7 children go missing every hour

India’s children are missing at a much faster rate than ever before with as many as 60,000 young ones below 18 reported missing in 2009 as compared to 44,000 in 2004 — a jump of 35%.

Updated on: Feb 21, 2011, 24:33:18 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India’s children are missing at a much faster rate than ever before with as many as 60,000 young ones below 18 reported missing in 2009 as compared to 44,000 in 2004 — a jump of 35%.

What is more disturbing is that only 40% of them are traced, mostly through individual efforts by parents.

It means that seven children, mostly from extremely poor families, go missing every hour with a count of 165 a day.

About 10% or 6,000 children, who went missing were infants less than a year old.

“The figure would have been higher had bigger states like Rajasthan, Orissa, Gujarat, Punjab and Tamil Nadu provided information under the Right To Information Act,” said Kailash Sathyarathi, chairman of NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan, which filed the RTI applications 10 months ago.

Twenty-four children going missing from Noida’s Nithari area in 2006 stirred the government to announce a Rs 200-crore scheme for a database of all missing children in India.

Only two states — Delhi and Haryana — have uploaded data on all missing children on Zipnet, a centralised database to help track them.

“There is not even 15% interest in implementing this good initiative,” said PM Nair, an Indian Police Service officer, who had worked on child issues with the United Nations and National Human Rights Commission on its study in 2004.

The RTI replies filed by the states show the police investigates just 15 % of complaints it receives because of manpower constrains. Implications were apparent in case of three children from Delhi, who were found in a brothel, a roadside eatery and in a begging gang six months after they were reported missing.

“In most cases investigation does not proceed more than 15-20 days,” Nair said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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