Organised crime behind missing children: CBI

With the identification of over 800 gangs engaged in child trafficking, a nexus of organised crime has been unearthed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

Updated on: Feb 23, 2011, 24:14:27 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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With the identification of over 800 gangs engaged in child trafficking, a nexus of organised crime has been unearthed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

Over 60,000 children went missing in India in 2009 compared to 44,000 in 2004, as highlighted by HT on February 21.

A number of such cases have come to light.

A girl, who went missing from Gaya in Bihar, was traced six months later to a brothel in Pune.

In another case, girls went missing from Sangam Vihar in south Delhi in 2009 were later found engaged in prostitution at Alwar, in Rajasthan.

A Sikh minor boy went missing from east Delhi was found employed at a roadside eatery in Meerut.

The common link in all these cases was nil investigation by the local police.

"In most cases, investigation does not proceed much and most of the times parents have to find the kids themselves," PM Nair, an Indian Police Service officer, said.

The involvement of gangs in abduction of children came on record when the CBI told the Delhi high court in 2006 that there were 815 gangs comprising 4,289 members involved in kidnapping of children for prostitution, begging and ransom in India.

This was despite several states failing to furnish information regarding involvement of such gangs in crime against children.

"It is just tip of an iceberg," said Raj Mangal Prasad of NGO Pratidhi, which obtained this information through RTI.

This January, the Delhi Police unearthed a racket of infants being sold for adoption in western suburb of Raghubir Nagar, over a year after the local police was informed about the illegal trade by NGOs.

"The accused was called and let off. She kept quiet for six months and resumed selling of children for adoption," said Rakesh Senger, secretary of Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA), a NGO whose RTI applications revealed that 60,000 children went missing from India in 2009.

The BBA also found there was huge discrepancy in crime against children, as revealed under the RTI and the data with the National Crime Records Bureau.

For instance, in West Bengal, the NCRB reported 583 cases of crime against children in 2008 and 2009 whereas the information provided by the state police was of over 24,000 cases.

Similar discord was reported from Maharashtra and Bihar.

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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