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Just 2 states submit missing children stats

As per data from the Ministry of Women and Child Development, between January 2012 and March 20, 2017, around 2,42,938 children went missing. Of these, only 1,70,173 have been traced till date.

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File photo of missing children being reunited with family
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With no information coming in from the states on the number of missing children lodged in child protection units across the country, the Centre had written to each state to furnish details, but at last tally, only two states — Punjab and Chhattisgarh — complied with the diktat. Therein too, considering the number of children that go missing every year, it is a dismally low number.

The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) had, on August 18, written to all states asking them to send details on two counts — how many children are lodged in their correctional facilities, and how many children have been recovered till now. In reply, Punjab said that they had 218 missing children, while Chhattisgarh had 86 missing children, numbers that belie the actual state of affairs. As per data from the Ministry of Women and Child Development, between January 2012 and March 20, 2017, around 2,42,938 children went missing. Of these, only 1,70,173 have been traced till date.

Of the 218 children, Punjab replied that children from Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Assam, Maharashtra, Odisha, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and one from Nepal as well, were lodged with the state’s Child Welfare Committees (CWCs). Chhattisgarh, additionally, said that of the 86 children lodged with its CWCs, there were children from Jharkhand, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Bihar, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana and some from Nepal.

The NCPCR has now asked the states to furnish the details by the end of October. “If the states are taking two months to find out how many missing children are lodged in their own CWCs, it points at how the situation is. If a state can find out the region from where a child is coming from and helps send the child back there, then the number of missing children will come down hugely,” said an NCPCR official working on the matter.

The official said that in the second week of November, the NCPCR has called for a meeting of officials from all state child protection units. “We will ask them to appoint a nodal correctional home, who will be responsible for informing the state from where the child is from originally so that the state can take the child back. If a young child is in a different state for a long time, it will forget the cultural and linguistic influences of his or her native state, making it difficult to trace back the child,” said the official, adding that WCD minister Maneka Gandhi has last week taken a stock of the work that NCPCR is doing on missing children.   

In 2005, the NHRC, in its NHRC Action Research on Trafficking report, said that on an average, every year 44,000 children go missing in India. Of these, over 11,000 children remain untraced. They are either sold to slavery or are trapped in trafficking syndicates. Data of the ministry of home affairs show that the number of untraced children has increased ever since. Between 2013 and 2016, the number of untraced children increased 84%; in 2013 while 34,244 children were traced, in 2015, the number was 62,988.

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