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Bengaluru: Girl sets out on foot to meet grandparents 270 km away
Recently, she had expressed her wish to return to her grandparents since she was not happy living in Bengaluru. However, the elderly couple insisted on her stay in Bengaluru for her education. Unable to convince her grandparents or relatives to take her back, she had decided to walk to Kodagu, the official said.
In their quest to track the 15-year-old girl, who was missing her grandparents and set out on foot from Bengaluru to a village in Kodagu to meet them, the Bengaluru police on Friday said it analysed over 250 CCTV cameras. During her journey on foot, the girl lost her way and was reunited with her family after two weeks.
“The painstaking efforts of the PI (police inspector) and the staff of the Banashankari PS in tracing a 15-yr-old orphan girl who was missing are praiseworthy. The girl left Bengaluru and decided to walk 270 km to meet her grandparents in Kodagu. She lost her way after walking for 20km and the police tracked her in 8 days after analysing the footage from 250 CCTV cameras,” Bengaluru police commissioner Kamal Pant said in Twitter post on Friday.
According to police, the 15-year-old left home on the morning of August 21. “She had lost her parents at a young age and she was living with relatives in Bengaluru since 2020. After her parents’ death, she was raised by maternal grandparents in Kodagu district and she was very close to them,” said a Banashankari police station official.
Recently she had expressed her wish to return to her grandparents since she was not happy living in Bengaluru. However, the elderly couple insisted on her stay in Bengaluru for her education. Unable to convince her grandparents or relatives to take her back, she had decided to walk to Kodagu, the official said.
Soon after this, the relatives of the girl filed a complaint with the police who then began searching for her. “We started looking at the CCTV cameras in the area. In total, we scanned through the footage of at least 250 cameras in the location. We first spotted her on a camera walking on Mysuru Road. So, we followed her on multiple CCTV cameras and found that she was near Kengeri. We couldn’t trace her after that,” said HP Puttaswamy, inspector at Banashankari police station.
Meanwhile, after walking for hours, hungry and lost, she knocked on the door of a random house off Mysuru Road. A woman in the house took her in and fed her. “The girl explained the entire situation to the woman and asked her not to inform police since they would send her back to her relatives. And the woman agreed,” said the police officer.
The girl was in the house for eight days. The police working on the input from the CCTV footage started doing a door-to-door enquiry to locate the girl. “We had reached the area where the girl was. It was during this time, the woman who had given her shelter came forward to inform the police that the girl was with her,” said the officer.
Police who suspected harassment from the relatives counselled the girl. She however insisted that they didn’t cause any problem and that she started walking because she wanted to meet her grandparents. The girl was taken to a rehabilitation centre near Nimhans and was later reunited with her grandparents, who took her to Kodagu on September 5.
