Killings in Nithari have given a boost to a government effort to launch a website to trace missing children.
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A first initiative of its kind is a joint venture of the ministry of Women and Child Development and UNICEF. "We expect to put up a pilot project on the web soon," a UNICEF official told HT. The pilot will connect a few cities with high human trafficking initially.
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In the years to come, the government plans to cover every police station in the country and it will also become mandatory to put complete information on the website about each missing children report lodged in the country. The information on the web would be available to all investigating agencies and NGOs across the nation. There will also be a facility for independent bodies to feed information about missing children. "We are working on security aspects of such a facility," the UNICEF official said.
So, if a child is found in a brothel in Delhi, the police would have a database to immediately find from where the child has gone missing. At present, when a kid is traced the information is send to the state police headquarters and then to district headquarters and finally, to the police station of the kid's native village. Through the web the information about the child being found will be sent directly to the police station where the missing report has been lodged. "It will greatly help in case of children who are found many years after they have gone missing or are traumatised and they don't remember about their native place exactly," a government official said.
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In addition to this, the government officials, say it will also help in speeding the process of restoration of the missing children to their families. In many cases, government agencies take months to transport the child back to the parents citing administrative delays. "We believe the new system will bring accountability as it will be a much more transparent process," a WCD ministry official said.
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In addition to this, the government officials, say it will also help in speeding the process of restoration of the missing children to their families. In many cases, government agencies take months to transport the child back to the parents citing administrative delays. "We believe the new system will bring accountability as it will be a much more transparent process," a WCD ministry official said.
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In another step, the WCD ministry is also asking the Home Ministry to amend CrPC to make a missing persons report a cognisable offence. At present, it is a non-cognisable offence and therefore it is not mandatory for police to investigate the case.
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.
