Child helpline helps 18-yr-old trace his family

Life changed for Luv Kush, the name he got at the New Delhi Railway Station, when an Allahabad child helpline told him last week it had traced his family in a remote village in Allahabad district.

Updated on: Jul 5, 2007, 01:35:15 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The story of Luv Kush, who found his family after 10 years, can give hope to the hundreds of parents whose missing children have not been traced.

Life changed for Luv Kush, the name he got at the New Delhi Railway Station, when an Allahabad child helpline told him last week it had traced his family in a remote village in Allahabad district.

His first reaction was a desire to meet his mother. “I don’t remember how they look now. I only remember faint images of my parents and an incident when my mother struck my foot by mistake,” he said, pointing at the scar.

Every year, the National Human Rights Commission survey says, about 45,000 children go missing, of which about 15,000 are not traced. This is mainly because of the weak child restoration system in India, said an NHRC official.

Although Luv Kush does not remember the exact year he went missing, he details the enormous trauma he has undergone. “I mistakenly took a wrong train from my aunt’s house and landed in Benaras. After staying at the railway station there for a couple of days, I took another train that brought me to the New Delhi Railway Station,” Luv Kush, now 18, recalled.

He wanted to go back home but help was not forthcoming. “I told people about my father’s and mother’s name and my village name but was not able to recall the railway station near my home. Nobody believed me and after some time I thought that I will never reach home,” he said.

Slowly, this thought percolated and his childhood memories faded. He found new life with about 20 other street children at the station and used to pick rags to feed himself. This went on for many years till Vijay, a volunteer of NGO Khushi, spotted him and enrolled him in the evening classes run by the NGO. “We asked him about his village but it appears he had forgotten almost everything,” said S. Geeta, for whom Luv Kush now works.

His fortune took another turn when he met a woman in Sangam Vihar, south Delhi, where the NGO runs an after-school learning centre. “When I told her about my village, she told me my parents still live there,” he said. It was then the Allahabad child helpline was contacted and his family was traced.

The long period has taken its toll on Luv Kush. He has no clue about his two younger brothers and three sisters. He can’t speak and understand a word of Bhojpuri, the native language in his village. “I will go there and try to learn everything once again,” he said.

Back home, his parents had never lost hope about his return. “They regularly asked the police about him,” Geeta said. Their wait will end soon. Luv Kush will meet his family in a couple of days. “We are working on the logistics,” she 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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