scorecardresearch
Friday, Mar 29, 2024
Advertisement
Premium

In two months, UP police reunite 96 missing kids with families

The families of 53 boys and 43 girls, mostly between the ages of five and fifteen, and kept in various child shelters across the state, were traced by nine teams.

In two months, UP police reunite 96 missing kids with families Operation Muskaan, which continued till August 18, was launched by the Uttar Pradesh DGP to bring families together. (EXPRESS PHOTO BY PRAVEEN KHANNA)

When police in Gautam Buddha Nagar started Operation Muskaan on June 18, even they couldn’t imagine they would be able to reunite 96 children with their families. The operation, which continued till August 18, was launched by the Uttar Pradesh DGP to bring families together.

The families of 53 boys and 43 girls, mostly between the ages of five and fifteen, and kept in various child shelters across the state, were traced by nine teams — one from the district’s anti-human trafficking unit (AHTU) and one each under the eight circle officers in the district.

“At the start of the operation, we had 135 missing children cases registered in our police stations. Twenty have been resolved through the operation, and the rest are children who had been missing from different districts or whose cases had not been registered,” said SP Crime Ashok Kumar.

Advertisement

According to an AHTU official, the standard procedure the teams have been following is visiting state-run and state-sponsored child shelters and trying to get the children to recollect the area of their homes. Once a child names an area, they ask the police station concerned if any missing child complaints have been lodged there. According to the official, the youngest children they have been able to rescue are five-year-olds. “The difficulty with cases of children younger than that is that they are unable to communicate with us or remember their homes. Another major difficulty arises when parents don’t file complaints with police, in which case we have to ask around the area with a picture of the child,” he said.

A particularly difficult case was that of 13-year-old Sunny, who had been missing for seven years. According to police, Sunny’s father, a guard, had been arrested in relation to a petty theft, while his mother ran off with another man. It was during this period that he was lured to Budaun by a man who made him work as a household help.

Festive offer

He managed to escape in a few months and spent three years on the move, until he was taken into a child shelter home in Budaun, where he spent four years. “In the meantime, his father got out of prison and on finding no one at their Noida home, moved elsewhere. The fact that he had been missing for a long time and was in a shelter home in another district, and that no one had filed a missing person complaint earlier… made the case very tough…” said an AHTU official.

Meanwhile, parents of another 12-year-old expressed apprehensions. “This is the third time he has gone missing in the last one-and-a-half years. He is a little mentally unstable and goes wandering off,” said the boy’s father.

First uploaded on: 28-08-2018 at 00:53 IST
Latest Comment
Post Comment
Read Comments
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
close