Times of India: Chennai: Thursday,
March 27, 2014.
This is no
magic trick. It is a serious problem that the government is directly
responsible for: More children are vanishing into thin air in the state with
each passing year. The state has not only contributed to the worrying
development but has neither a solution nor the resolve to tackle it, forget
about a magic wand.
Eight
children go missing in Tamil Nadu every day, a large majority of whom are
girls.
Data obtained
through the RTI Act shows there has been a steady increase in cases of missing
children in the state from 2,325 in 2010 to 3,063 in 2013. As many as 203
children vanished in 14 days, starting from January 1 this year.
The
government has not been napping on the job. It's done a Rip Van Winkle. Its
Missing Child Bureau, in the department of social defence, has existed only in
name for the past seven years, with the state failing to appoint any official
to the bureau since 2007.
The government
set up the bureau in 2001 to coordinate with enforcement agencies and track
down missing children. The official reason for it being dysfunctional is that
the government is short of manpower: An excuse that's hard to believe given how
overstaffed the offices of some departments are.
According to
government statistics, 11,026 children have gone missing since 2010 and 879
remain untraced, with police failing to account for 488 girls and 391 boys. The
breakup weighs heavily against girls, who account for 7,002 cases or 63% of the
total, as compared to boys (4,024), a skew that the government should consider
a cause for serious concern. The Juvenile Justice Act stipulates that an
officer in every police station should be trained in child welfare. But, as social
activist A Narayanan says, most police stations don't have child welfare
officers.
"The
fact is that the Missing Child Bureau has virtually shut down and police
stations in TN don't have child welfare officers," said Narayanan, whose
PIL on trafficking of children from the Northeast is pending before the Madras
high court. "That's why more children are going missing every year."
Activists say people working for gangs that have networks across the state
snatch newborns from government hospitals in cities like Chennai and abduct
children from busy public places.
Children who
go missing face an uncertain future at best. Most often, activists say,
organised gangs make them beg on the streets or work in factories, illegally
sell their organs for transplantation or force them into child sex rackets.
Activists
like Virgil D'Sami, executive director of child rights NGO Arunodhaya, estimate
that half of all missing children cases are unreported, mostly because the
victims are from families of migrant workers who cannot communicate with local
officials because they don't know Tamil or English.
The Tamil
Nadu police have their own take on the statistics. A senior police officer said
the rise in missing children cases was mainly because of an increase in public
awareness. "Also, most missing children are runaways," he said.
But facts and
figures show that the assertion is specious. Here's a pointer to the state's
lack of concern about the problem. The Supreme Court had in March 2013 issued
notices to the Centre and states, asking them to file status reports on missing
children. When Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Arunachal Pradesh failed to meet a
deadline extended by the apex court to submit the reports, a furious Supreme
Court bench threatened to order the arrest of chief secretaries of these
states.
Had things
gone according to plan, the government would have tasked its Missing Child
Bureau to prepare the reports. But the bureau is missing itself.