Times of India: Mumbai: Monday, November 03, 2014.
George
Vincent's brother went missing in Mumbai in 1991, but he and his family are yet
to find closure. "It has been almost 25 years since my brother ran away
after he was scolded for not going to church on a Sunday," said Vincent,
who now lives in Kerala. "The police never traced him."
On October
28, Siddhant Sudhakar (19), the first student with autism to clear SSC exams in
2011, goes missing from Kandivli's Thakur Village. On November 1, he walks into
his aunt's Andheri home.
The city
police are yet to trace 439 of the 2,892 boys and 240 of the 2,060 girls (below
15 years of age) who went missing between 2011 and 2013, revealed an RTI query.
Worse, 0.6% boys and 0.2% girls, who had gone missing during this period, were
either found dead or were killed later.
The
"still missing" figures, according to the RTI reply, have been
increasing every year. In 2011, the police failed to trace 101 boys and 60
girls; the number rose to 153 and 72 respectively in 2012 and to 185 and 108
respectively in 2013, said activist Chetan Kothari, whose RTI query to the
Mumbai crime branch's missing persons bureau elicited the statistics (see box).
Such cases
are usually accorded low priority by the police who have to focus on
maintaining law and order. "In most states, police do not even register an
FIR; they just put the name on their missing people's list," said a former
IPS officer.
Former Thane
police commissioner S P S Yadav said, "That's why the Bombay HC has given
elaborate guidelines, including publishing a missing person's photograph and
the declaration of reward, for tracing missing persons."
Kothari
suggested, "Cops should react immediately when a missing case is
registered and also set up a tracking system."
But Mumbai
police spokesperson DCP Dhananjay Kulkarni clarified, "Missing complaints
are seriously dealt with on priority. Every police station has a separate
three-member team that gets updates and works on tracing missing kids."
According to
the police, kidnapped children are forced into human trafficking, illegal organ
transplant, begging and child labour; very few are abducted for ransom. Former
IPS officer-turned-lawyer Y P Singh said, "Strife at home, parental pressure
over studies and career advancement are the major reasons for kids to run from
home." Psychiatrist Harish Shetty said, "Families do seek help during
such crisis, but they should first allow a counsellor to speak to their child
if they think he or she is facing problems at home."
A study by
NGO Childline conducted last year pegged the yearly average of missing kids in
India at 44,475. It found that Maharashtra, with an annual average of 13,881,
has the largest number of missing kids in the country. Among cities, Mumbai is
the worst and Kolkata next.
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