In child smuggler’s words, villagers called him ‘God’

KOLKATA, March 13 : Police ki ankhon me mein child smuggler, lekin gaonwale mujhe bhagwan samajthe the. Dada, mein bacche smuggle karta tha, ismein bahut paisa hai (Police may call me a trafficker, but I was god to the villagers. I used to traffick children. It gives good money),” says Tushar Bashar (name changed), once a child trafficker in Sandeshkhali, South 24 Parganas.

According to locals and police, he smuggled at least 50 children out of the villages in Sandeshkhali. Business was good for Tushar, a well-built man with thin moustache, till he sold one of his own relatives to the child trafficking racket and later came to know that the girl had landed into a brothel
in Delhi.
“I was full of remorse. I was repentant. I had brought the girl from my poor maternal uncle’s home with the promise that she would find a good house and paid a decent salary in Delhi. But once out of Kolkata, the agents who had taken her away could not provide any information about the girl for months and not a penny reached my uncle. Finally, I learnt that she was in a brothel. I had to leave my house as my uncle and other relatives kept visiting me and insisted on getting the girl back. This is my new address that my relatives do not know. They have lost track of me. I have also changed track to settle for other things,” says Bashar. He now works as a security guard with a well-known group in Kolkata.
Talking to The Indian Express, he narrated how the racket works at the grassroot level in villages like Sandeshkhali.
“I could speak well and convince people. Once you earn the confidence of a couple of homes in a particular village, the urge to send children to places like Delhi and Mumbai is like a tide,”
he says.
“There are so many children and so many mouths to feed. We were hailed as gods by the villagers, as they thought we could provide their children with jobs. Parents depend on the income of their children. It used this to our benefit. We told them that the children would find work as domestic helps in good households of Delhi and Mumbai.
They will earn substantial money. But they were sold,” says Bashar, sitting with his wife in the lawn of his house, in Sandeshkhali village.
According to Bashar, the agents in the districts and in Kolkata have people in villages who work for them.
They often also have tie-ups with agencies in Delhi, Mumbai and other big cities which provide domestic help services.
The children are moved to railway stations and transit lodges in Kolkata in groups of 10 and 20. They are taken to bigger cities by the agents through trains and buses, tells Bashar.
Once in Delhi or Mumbai, they are sorted according to their age and looks. The good-looking and young children are sold into sex trade. The others are sent to brothels or to households.
“A good-looking young girl fetched me anything between Rs 4000 to Rs 6000,” says Bashar. The chain upwards is intricate and is not disclosed to those below, Bashar adds.
“The parents are promised Rs 1000 to 1500 per month, but in most cases the payment is only for the first or second month. The standard story then is that the child has escaped from where he was employed and hence could not be contacted.” There were over 70 such agents in Sandeshkhali block when he was into the racket about a year ago, Bashar says.
He also ackowledges the involvement of both local police and local politicians. “Regular share was given to the police as well as the local village panchayat members of political parties. I used to work as a trafficker under a former village panchayat vice-chairman who belongs to the CPI(M). A good network in the villages and the financial condition of the families in the neighbouring villages was essential to run the racket,” says Bashar.
Members of an NGO, Save the Children, which is working for rehabilitation of the rescued trafficked children say that at least nine traffickers have been persuaded to get back to the mainstream in the past two years in Sandeshkhali.
http://www.indianexpress.com/story/25567.html

Low on police priority, missing cases on a high

Ravik Bhattacharya
Posted online: Tuesday, March 13, 2007 at 0000 hrs

Kolkata, march 12 : If the report by Kolkata police’s Missing Persons Squad is any indication, an abnormally high number of children disappear every year from city homes. Out of about 40,000 people gone missing from the city between 1996 and 2005 (as per the latest figures available with the Kolkata police), the number of children is significantly high. Over 15,600 children have disappeared during this period from the city.

Meanwhile, for a small fragment of those who make it back home, the return is often due to providential escape. Take the case of Sudha. The 14-year-old girl of a split family moved several hands on the promise of job and safe upkeep. “At one house, the day I landed, the drivers downstairs targeted me. I was sexually exploited for nearly a year in that multi-storeyed house,” she said. One day, Sudha managed to call the STD booth near her house and pass on the address she was staying at. She was rescued by the people of her locality with police help.
Detective Department chief Gyanwant Singh traces a pattern in the missing links. Data analysis shows, those in the age-group of five to six years are mostly lost and found cases and are mostly reported from slums of the city. A small number account for “kidnapping” cases, engineered mostly by their near and dear ones. Bad school results and family atrocity account for a large number of cases in the age-group of 10-15 years, Singh says.
A new trend, he says, is homosexuality, the expression of which is said to be forcing some, though a small fraction, to flee homes. For example, two Class IX girls of a reputed Kolkata school fled to Siliguri in 2006. Traced to a hotel, the girls reportedly confessed their plans to marry and live together.
A study, sponsored by the National Human Rights Commission, on trafficking of women and children in the city reflects the shocking state of affairs. It says: “It is alarming and it is true... Kolkata seems to be most unsafe for children among all the cities in the country.” The study, in collaboration with the Delhi-based Institute of Social Sciences, over a six-year period from 1996 to 2001, found a whopping 133 per cent rise in the number of children gone missing in Kolkata.
The response of the police missing squads is abysmal. There are two separate units in the state to deal with such cases — the Kolkata police, having jurisdiction over the municipal area of the city, and the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) that looks after the cases in the districts.
“It is true that such cases are dealt as general diary cases in local police stations because missing children cannot be related to any crime. It is also true that apart from recording the diary and occasionally visiting the victim's house, little else is done,” said Banibrata Basu, an inspector general of police, who has served as the head of both the Detective Department of the Kolkata police as well as the Missing Persons Squad of the CID. Basu acknowledges that the problem in Bengal is inextricably linked to human trafficking and, therefore, needs a co-ordinated approach of the police, the panchayats and the NGOs.
But both the units are restricted by shortage of manpower, funds and resources. At times, the cops agree to undertake the journey only if the victim’s party is willing to bear the costs. But that often is an unofficial arrangement and the poor can hardly afford to foot such bills.
Moreover, the missing cases are given the lowest priority since they are not considered crime until linked to kidnapping, trafficking or smuggling. The Missing Persons Squad of the Kolkata police, at present, comprises barely 12 persons, including two inspectors, five sub-inspectors, three assistant sub-inspectors and two constables. Their job is restricted to recording the cases and arranging for publication or flashing of the missing persons’ photographs in newspapers or television channels.
The CID Missing Persons Squad, too, has around 14 members, headed by an inspector and a deputy superintendent of police.
“We have to deal with a tremendous volume of cases. Everyday, at least 20 people come to us. What can we do? The officers are busy recording the statements and talking to the victim’s relatives. Let alone taking up investigations and search operations, the process of maintaining the records and publication of the victim’s details in the media are in themselves difficult to handle,” said an officer, in charge of the department. Then, the officials get a meager travelling allowance for the job.
“We are trying to tackle the issue by way of inter-linking police stations with the CID missing persons' squad to speed up the process. In 2007, we are targeting human trafficking as the thrust area,” said Sanjay Mukherjee, DIG CID (Special), who also holds charge of the Missing Persons Squad. Biswanath Chowdhury, state Minister for Social Welfare and Jails, said, “It is a serious crisis. A state-wide survey is underway with the help of three universities to find out details of missing and trafficked children and women.”

http://www.indianexpress.com/story/25462.html

‘Seeing her die would’ve been better’

Johnson T A
Posted online: Wednesday, March 07, 2007 at 0000 hrs

Bangalore, March 6: • If she had taken ill before my eyes it would still have been okay. Even if she had died before my eyes it would not have hurt so much. Now, I don’t know what my little daughter is going through. She must be helpless,” says 11-year-old Shilpa Dasarath’s mother, Bharati. On the afternoon of November 5, 2006, Bharati sent Shilpa, the eldest of her three children, to the main road in the lower middle class locality of Udayanagar, on the outskirts of Bangalore, to check out if the local barber shop was open. Shilpa never returned from what should have been a five-minute trip. Her classmate reported that she had seen her walking away with a strange man, while a shopkeeper some distance away claimed to have seen a girl matching her description perched on a camel and crying.
• Bangalore-based autorickshaw driver Suresh and his wife Savita have been searching for their younger son Abhishek since December 10, 2006. The five-year-old child went missing from a locality on the outskirts of Bangalore. With no money to put up even an advertisement, Suresh and his wife have been combing the city streets hoping to find their kid. “I never had the money to buy my son any of the things he liked. I thought I would do it when I have the money. I hope I can at least see him again,” Suresh says.
Between January 1, 2005, and January 30, 2007, 4,568 children below the age of 18 were reported missing in Bangalore city alone. According to the data available with the Missing Persons Bureau (MPB), as many as 1,434 remain untraced to date. The total number of those reported missing in the state between January 2005 and October 2006 was 14,773, with 12,441 remaining untraced (State Crime Records Bureau data).
However, policemen in-charge of both the MPB and the SCRB admit the data is skewed. Like in the rest of the country, police register FIRs in case of missing people rather reluctantly. “When a person goes missing, there is no law saying a case has to be registered, unless a crime is involved. A large number of cases are being registered in Karnataka because it was decided many years ago that this would provide accountability in case it is later discovered that a crime was also involved,” says K Srinivasan, Additional Director General of Police, SCRB.
The role of the police, however, tends to end with the registration of FIR, and investigations are usually cursory. There is no dedicated team to investigate cases and even the MPB is currently a one-man unit engaged in data processing. “Investigation of cases of missing children requires a dedicated team, working on a daily basis. At most police stations, serious crimes and law and order issues engage the resources, so cases of missing children are pursued only if complainants are persistent,” says Alok Kumar, Deputy Commissioner of Police, Bangalore (South).
Incidentally, the highest number of missing cases come from the outlying areas of Bangalore, which have a concentration of migrant labourers, daily wage earners and factory workers. The majority of these families are poor and ill-educated and the parents rarely have the time, money or resources to pursue their cases.
Parents of both Shilpa and Abhishek say police registered a complaint only after they dug in their heels. The local police first told Shilpa’s father Dasarath that she would return after four-five days. It was only when the havaldar in the Army’s Madras Engineering Group and a former Services boxer brought some pressure on the police through a local councillor that they registered a complaint.
In the hope of finding their child, the family follows every small lead about their missing child. Over the past three months they have travelled across the state distributing pamphlets and posters of Shilpa. They have consulted psychics, astrologers, fortune-tellers and soothsayers.
“We have run out of money now. We want to sell a small piece of land we own and continue our search. There have been so many horror stories about children since Shilpa went missing. We have to find her,” says Bharati.
According to police, a majority of cases involving children relate to runaways and only occasionally to kidnapping or child trafficking (mostly from northern districts of Karnataka). “Most children who go missing are runaway kids. They come from impoverished homes where there is little care for them ,” says a police inspector at the Subramanyapura police station, which had solved 145 of the 214 missing children cases in 2005 and 2006.
“Missing children are invariably from marginalised homes, especially the smaller ones. There are also a large number of mentally unstable children. The older boys tend to be runaways,” says Nina Nayak, Chairperson of the Karnataka Child Welfare Committee.
What makes tracing of missing kids more difficult is the system itself. With multiple agencies gathering data, there is no collation, networking or a systematic reporting procedure. The State Crime Record Bureau merely classifies missing cases under the broad head “Man Missing” and has no system to break the data down on age, sex or other criterion.
“The data we provide is very crude. There is gross under-reporting of both missing cases and the case resolution. Every district does not send reports when people go missing or when they are traced,” says ADGP, State Crime Records Bureau, Srinivasan.
The two-year-old Missing Persons Bureau, using more sophisticated but privately donated software to log missing people cases, tends to provide more rigorous data on missing kids, he said. The SCRB, however, issues a crude monthly gazette for police circulation in Karnataka and the rest of the country, containing pictures and names of missing persons and unclaimed bodies.
In December 2006, R Srikumar, Director General of Police, in a report filed before the Karnataka High Court on improving the process of handling cases of missing persons recommended registration of all missing cases; a special squad to investigate them; supervision by designated senior officers; and a centralised police information network —- linked to a national grid as well, for quick, easy and all-round dissemination of information. The report also recommended empowerment of beat policemen with modern communication systems, the creation of a missing persons public web portal and setting up of facilitie s to collect forensic evidence to establish identities. “We need a system where as many eyes as possible are looking for a missing child. Every minute is important, every day is important,” says Srikumar.

In UP, nobody ever kept records of missing kids

Express News Service
Posted online: Friday, March 02, 2007 at 0000 hrs

After a High Court order, the government asked police stations to set up missing children cells

LUCKNOW/ KANPUR/ FAIZABAD, March 1 : It wasn’t Nithari but an Allahabad High Court directive on the call of a harried father searching for his 14-year-old son for the last two years that forced the Uttar Pradesh government to ask all police stations to constitute special missing children cells and compile figures.
It was finally on February 6, thanks to the court orders, that the government completed compilation of the figures of missing children for UP for the year 2006 and submitted to the court. As many as 3,649 children went missing in the State last year, 3016 of whom were between the age of 10 years and 18 years. (See Box).
All this has been known because of one man’s search. Vishnu Dayal Sharma, a retired postal department employee living in Agra’s Mohan Girara village, has been looking for his son Krishna Gopal since February 22, 2005, when he left for his maternal uncle Banwari Lal’s place in Jagdishpura, 4 km away from where he went to school, never to return.
Between the day he lodged a police report on February 24, 2005, and the day the High Court asked the police to act on January 3, 2007, Sharma had done the entire ladder from the local police station to the IGP but to no avail. “I felt they were not interested in tracing my son and so I moved the court,” he said.
While Jagdishpura police did start work on the court’s order, it only surprised Sharma further. The police called him and told him that Krishna’s uncle Banwari Lal had been detained because his was the last destination the boy had gone to. Sharma said, “I have no reason to suspect Banwari. The police just want to dispose of the case somehow.”
SO of Jagdishpura RK Sharma disagrees. “The maternal uncle is not a nice person and wishes to confiscate Sharma’s land and so must have prompted the boy to run away. The boy himself was not popular in his locality,” he said. Besides Banwari, the police have lodged an FIR against another boy Pradip, with whom Krishna had a tiff some 10 months ago. Asked when would be the child found, Sharma said, “Very soon.”
Sharma’s is in no way an isolated case. The Indian Express reporters in Uttar Pradesh have found at least 15 cases of children missing from one month to two years in Lucknow, Kanpur, Faizabad and many other districts — everywhere, the police were found casual and sluggish.
Take Anshuman Yadav, 17, whose father has met all the top police officers, including DGP Bua Singh, former I-G Lucknow Zone AK Gupta and former I-G Special Task Force Jagmohan Yadav. “We are planning to meet the DGP again to request his personal intervention,” Anshuman’s father Brijendra Prasad Yadav, an assistant engineer with the Housing and Development Board, said.
Ever since he went missing in May 2006, his family is scared, more so after they received a ransom letter a month after he disappeared, asking for Rs 10 lakh. The letter asked them to draw a circle on the first compartment of the Chhapra Express when it halts at Lucknow railway station the very day if they agreed to pay and they would be contacted 10 days later. That was June but the family is yet to hear again from them.
“Once, a relative received an SMS stating “Anshuman Yadav” . The sender switched off the cellphone immediately. A few days later, it was on but was quickly put off,” Brijendra Prasad said.
Investigating Officer Ishad Ali said, “This case is different from routine abductions because the kidnappers never contacted the family.” If the government took any initiative post-Nithari, it was an instruction from Principal Secretary (Home) to Director-General of Police to ask police stations to treat all kidnappings as “special report” cases wherein the Circle Officer has to visit the spot within 24 hours and the progress of the investigation is monitored up to the level of the Inspector General of Police of the zone. Inspector General (I-G) level officers have been made the in-charge of these committees.
The catch is that there is nothing new in this directive. Uttar Pradesh Police Regulations already require officers to treat disappearance of children as special crime. Former Director-Generals of Police Shri Ram Arun and MC Dwivedi both said there was nothing new in the directive. “The problem in Uttar Pradesh,” says Arun, “is the growing tendency of policemen to conceal if a missing child is suspected to be kidnapped, just to show the crime as lower.”
A Division Bench of the Allahabad High Court, comprising Justice Amar Saran and RN Mishra, also made a similar observation, referring to Nithari: “The police were either engaged in other important work or did not want to inflate the crime record.”
Police officers and NGO workers say there are broadly three trends of children’s disappearance in UP: kidnapping for ransom; children running away on their own because the family is too poor; and abduction for revenge against parents. The court has also sought to address the lack of seriousness among policemen by saying, “There should be no attempt to not file FIRs on flimsy grounds that the boy or girl has eloped. All information related to missing children should be collated.” Nothing explains the situation better than the fact that Childline, the child helpline service initiated by the Union Ministry of Women & Child Development, restored as many as 54 children to their homes out of 61 whose parents reported missing between April and December 2006 from across the state. The Lucknow district police found 300 out of 1,047 missing report cases in 2006.

They left these villages for jobs, never to return

Ravik Bhattacharya,Indian Express, March 12,2007

KOLKATA, MARCH 11: Over the past five years, Sandeshkhali in South 24 Parganas has reported hundreds of missing boys and girls. With an inactive administration responding inadequately to the problem, the numbers only keep rising. Most affected families have not registered cases, as they feel the police will not be of much help. Many bank on the hope that their children will return someday and it’s better not to involve the police.

Shankar Sardar of Baro Asgara village hasn’t heard from his 14-year-old son Sambhu for the past 16 months. When his neighbour Kamala Kanta offered Sambhu a job at a monthly salary of Rs 1,500, he could hardly resist. With one less mouth to feed plus the additional income, the deal wasn’t bad for Shankar either.

But not a penny has reached Shankar till now. Neither does he know the whereabouts of his son. An agricultural labourer, Shankar neither had the courage nor the resources to visit the police station—15 km away with a couple of rivers to cross—to lodge a complaint. “Whenever I ask about my son, Kamala Kanta replies that he has escaped from the address where he was employed and is now untraceable,” says Shankar about his neighbour, who is now somewhere in UP’s Faizabad.

Every other household in the village has a similar tale to narrate. About 2 km from Shankar’s village is Bhatidaha, where Taccho Sheikh’s 16-year-old daughter Jabeda Khatun has been missing for over two years now. “Jabeda was fair and looked like a memsahib,” says the father. She was working in a brick-kiln till one fine morning two local youths told Taccho that she had been married off to a good family in Haryana. When Taccho and his wife Sabita Bibi insisted on Jabeda’s new address, the youths just said: “Good family, good house”. More pressure yielded a piece of paper with directions on how to reach her in-laws: “Husband: Ishak Sheikh, Witness: Nasiruddin Jakir. Get down at New Delhi, board bus No 77 to New Bazar and get an auto from there to Kaligaon at Rs 5.”

Instead of trying out the address in an unknown land, Taccho made it to Sandeshkhali police station and fell at the feet of the officer-in-charge. After several visits and desperate pleas, the OC agreed to make a diary entry and promised to book the youths. However, no police action followed. The youths have meanwhile left following pressure from the villagers.

On the other hand, there are scores of households where children have returned. Many narrate how they were tortured and sexually exploited in brothels and households.

In Malancha Rajbari, a 15-year-old girl managed to return after a year in a Delhi brothel. The teenager used to work at a brick-kiln in Basirhat, about 70 km from Kolkata, before she was lured with the promise of a good marriage.

“Once in Delhi, they put me in a brothel where I was tortured and sexually abused. It continued for about a year before I ran away one morning.”

The walls of the one-room office of Save the Children—an NGO which has started work in the area recently—is cluttered with charts and maps, all pointing to the magnitude of the problem here. One such statistics shows that between April 2004 and June 2006, as many as 540 missing children have returned to their homes in 18 villages.

But figures at the local police station show just a fraction of the problem. Its database reveals that between 2003 and 2006 at least 218 male children have been recorded as missing, of which 14 were traced. The number of missing girls during this period is 455, of whom 29 have returned, says the police. “We are so busy with crimes like murder, rioting and dacoity that we hardly have any time for missing children,” says the duty officer.

However, Sandeshkhali is only symbolic of a growing tide of missing children in West Bengal. Districts like Murshidabad, Malda, Nadia, North and South Jalpaiguri as well as Uttar and Dakshin Dinajpur too have similar stories to tell. There is no singular pattern of missing children in West Bengal, though trafficking is inalienable in most such cases.

But there are often common features associated with missing children in certain districts.

For instance in different villages of North 24 Parganas, groups of young boys and girls are employed in Nautanki groups that visit rural Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa. Many of them never return home. For instance, at least seven children from Diyaldaha in Bagda of North 24 parganas, who went to Bihar for a performance, have been missing since. The police here however are reluctant to book such cases as the incident pertains to another state.

Supriyo Chowdhury, an NGO consultant and project worker for Action Research on Trafficking in Women and Children, a study published by NHRC, says “young girls and effeminate boys are chosen to perform lewd dances in Bihar. Most of these children are sexually abused after being abducted”.

“Many cases are never reported. Most of these children are trafficked to Mumbai, Delhi, Allahabad and even West Asia. Girls are sexually exploited, boys made to beg or work in West Asian countries. Parents report the cases as missing, but in reality they are trafficked out of the country,” says Chowdhury.

Many boys from Murshidabad are sent to the Middle East to be trained as camel jockeys. Many of them are killed or maimed for life. Others are trafficked to Gulf countries for begging.

The Dubai Police has often deported children working for begging rackets in the emirate. In fact, the study details specific case studies of victims and traffickers operating for begging rackets in the Gulf as well as the metroes.

— (To be continued tomorrow)

Maharashtra dossier on missing kids

Indian Express ,Feb 13 2007

PUNE, FEBRUARY 12 :State Director-General of Police P S Pasricha today said he had instructed all nine police commissionerates and 33 police districts in the state to prepare dossiers on missing children across Maharashtra in the wake of the Nithari killings. The DGP also spoke of increased trafficking of women in Maharashtra, especially Mumbai.

“A special drive is being conducted by the social security branch of the police across the state to nab those engaged in the trade,” he said. He was speaking to the media on the sidelines of the 60th Foundation Day Celebrations of the State Wireless Department here.
Asked about the steps taken by his office to curb the menace of missing children in the state being highlighted in a series by The Indian Express, Pasricha said, “A circular seeking the details of missing children has been sent to all police districts and commissionerates”.
The Pune police has already begun a drive across the 20 police stations in the city, which reported 212 boys and 241 girls missing in 2006. The actual figure is 549 boys and 627 girls but the city police claims 337 boys and 386 girls were ‘recovered’ (returned home on their own or were traced by their parents and relatives).
Pasricha appealed to parents and relatives of the missing children, who have returned home, to inform the police stations where they had registered the missing complaints. “Our experience shows that 90 per cent of the children return home but parents fail to inform the police about their return, which further compounds the problem,” he said.
Saying both parents and teachers had a greater role to play, Pasricha advised them to sensitise themselves on issues related to their children. “There is need to create awareness about the issues affecting children. A simple thing like exam fever has made many children run away from their homes,” he said.

http://www.indianexpress.com/iep/sunday/story/23215.html

In Capital, every second missing person is a child

Nithari wake-up call: Delhi cops open nine new cells, new circular alerts ranks, explains drill to locate kids

NEW DELHI, FEBRUARY 12:Of the 15,000 who went missing from the Capital last year, 7,000 were minors — almost every second case brought to the police notice was that of a missing child. As it grapples with these cases and learns from the Nithari serial killings in neighbouring Noida and the conduct of the police there before the chilling discovery, the police in Delhi have started reworking priorities.
Police Commissioner K K Paul has held more than one meeting on missing children and a circular has been issued to all units reminding them of the drill in such cases. Post-Nithari, a review of cases of missing children is taken up every Tuesday at a meeting Paul holds at the police headquarters.
In addition to the existing missing persons cell, the police have nine new new cells on the job across the city. This too is post-Nithari. Joint Commissioners and Assistant Commissioners, who will be responsible for these cells in addition to their current assignments, have also been identified. Joint Commissioner (Crime) Ranjit Narayan says ‘‘the entire system has been streamlined further’’.
Neeraj Thakur, DCP (Crime) who tracks the progress on cases of missing persons, says ‘‘there is no clear pattern of how and from which parts of the capital do most children go missing. There are as many cases of children going missing, say, from Vasant Kunj to a resettlement colony like Sultanpuri. What’s somewhat common is that children go missing or run away after quarrels at home or from the exam stress. Very often, parents do not get back to the police, especially if it involves girls approaching adulthood.’’
Delhi police say though figures for children gone missing are very high, so’s the recovery rate. Narayan says the 2006 recovery rate was a high 88 per cent.
‘‘This figure would be higher if parents of all children who are traced or have returned home voluntarily get back to the police. Mostly, it’s only the incident of the child gone missing that is reported to the police. Not the child`s return. Often in cases involving missing girls, we find that the family has shifted home. The neighbours tell us that the girl has returned. The fact is that our recovery rate is higher than in several Western countries,” says Narayan
The Indian Express accessed an internal circular sent to all district chiefs by Narayan on February 6 on the subject of missing children. The three-page note indirectly refers to the Nithari incident: “New experience has shown that conducting a search of the immediate area (including drains) would be useful.”
In the circular, eight steps have been listed for the investigating officer (IO) when a child is being reported missing. Spot investigations involve nine stages. The police have identified at least five “motives” behind a missing child:
• Sexual
• Murder — Act of killing itself could bring arousal/gratification
• Ransom — The abductor could make contact
• Profit — In cases of trafficking
• Miscellaneous — personal vengeance by childless mother etc
The new circular notes that “in many cases the culprit resided, worked, frequented or had some association with the immediate area frequented by the missing child. Often it has been seen that the culprit had even been contacted by the IO during initial investigation but went undetected because of hasty and cursory nature of the inquiry/investigation. A very important lesson to be learnt from these cases is that there is no substitute for thoroughness in executing a prompt neighbourhood investigation and search.”
While police blame parents for not getting back to them, it’s also a fact that it’s not easy reporting a missing child and hoping the police swing into action immediately. Autorickshaw-driver Kundan Lal’s son Babloo disappeared from near their home on December 11, 2005. Bimla, the boy’s mother, says no one saw Babloo leave. As Kundan Lal was away, neighbours lodged a missing complaint at the Sangam Vihar police station. The next day, Kundan Lal went to the police station to lodge an FIR. “They refused to lodge an FIR, telling me to look for my child first. I kept visiting the police station but they told me to trace my son,” he says.
Many visits later, the police, says Kundan Lal, agreed to an FIR. “They asked me to arrange a vehicle for the policemen who would go in search of my son. I decided to take them in my auto.” For a week, Lal, who plies a rented autorickshaw, took the policemen wherever they asked him to. A week later, he couldn’t fund the rides anymore.
Kundan Lal approached the National Human Rights Commission on January 25, 2006. Acting on his complaint, the NHRC wrote to DCP (South District) and DCP (Vigilance) asking them to submit an Action Taken Report within two weeks.

http://www.indianexpress.com/iep/sunday/story/23210.html
Babloo remains untraced.

With Naxalites around, cops here have no time to track missing kids

Indian Express, Feb 15,2007

Raipur, February 14 :• Days before Holi in 2003, 5-year-old Anju went missing while playing with friends outside her home. Ever since, Sushila and Anil Tandi, her parents, have been making daily rounds of the Khamardih police station. Sushila now doesn’t let her other two children out of sight. Anil has searched Nagpur, Bhopal, Gwalior, even Delhi but has had no luck. “Whenever I approach the police, they tell me, ‘Tumhari beti ko dhoondhne ke alawa aur koi kaam nahi hai kya hamare paas’ (Do you think we have no other work than to look for your daughter?)”. So whenever Anil manages to save money, he sets out in search of his daughter himself.
• Six-year-old Sonia Rao went missing on August 14 last year while on her way home from school in Raipur.She was later found in Nagpur, where she had been sold by child-lifters within hours of her abduction. But it wasn’t the police who sniffed her out. Sonia’s mother, Sharda Rao, led a crowd from her colony to the Collectorate and police station for two days to mount pressure on the administration. “I was shattered but knew that if I didn’t act quickly chances of seeing my daughter again were slim.” The pressure tactics worked, teams went out and Sonia was traced to an orphanage in Nagpur where she had been kept by the Maharashtra Police. Three persons were arrested on charges of involvement in trafficking. It’s another matter that the Chhattisgarh Police learnt of Sonia’s return almost six days later.
The police do not maintain records on the number of children missing in Chhattisgarh. However, there seems to be a pattern in the disappearance of children there. Social activists confirm that most of these abductions are linked to the flesh trade and most of the victims are minor girls. “A majority of these children are taken to nearby towns where they are thrown into prostitution,” said Dr Ilina Sen, member of the Committee Against Violence on Women. “We have often demanded that policing should be increased in certain vulnerable areas of the state. However, the authorities plead there is a shortage of manpower,”
NGOs involved in women and child welfare estimate that only 10 per cent of kidnappings are registered with the police. Which means that the actual numbers could be much higher than the police figures of around 650 children missing during 2006 and about 620 in 2005. “As most complainants in tribal areas are illiterate, they cannot differentiate between lodging a complaint and a First Information Report. All that the police do is make a daily diary entry and issue the complainants non-cognisable receipts, telling them that a ‘case’ has been registered. Since an FIR adds to the crime statistics, the police tend to nip the trouble in the bud,” Anita Gupta, a social activist, alleged.
According to the police themselves, there are gangs in the state that lift children to be sold to brothels in other towns. The recovery of Sonia was a case in point. Tehrunissa, Sheikh Maksood and Ramesh, members of an inter-state trafficking gang, were arrested for kidnapping and selling Sonia. They confessed during interrogation that they were active in Chhattisgarh for the past couple of years. “The accused used to abduct children from Raipur and sell them in the red light districts of Nagpur and in other cities,” a senior police officer said. Since the arrest of the three, police have also decided to increase their interaction with their counterparts in neighbouring states to check the trafficking.
That may be an important step forward since there is no Chhattisgarh Police cell to deal with cases of missing children. The Chhattisgarh Police claims that its priority is the Naxal menace and child recovery isn’t high on their to-do list. This despite the Chhattisgarh Police circulating the Supreme Court guidelines on missing children, which directs the local police to act immediately in such cases. “Currently the local police has been entrusted with the job of locating missing children and we don’t think there is any need for a specialised cell to deal with the issue,” said Additional Director General of Police (CID) S K Paswan. He claimed that they were in the process of compiling the statistics and said the information would be available “shortly”.
When The Indian Express tried to seek the version of DGP O P Rathor, he refused to speak on the issue, firmly saying that no data could be provided on missing children in Chhattisgarh. “I do not want a Nithari-like panic in my state,” Rathor retorted.
Despite the constant reference to the chilling happenings at Nithari and the increasing incidences of crimes against children in Chhattisgarh, Home Minister Ram Vichar Netam also felt that there was no need for the creation of a separate cell to deal with such cases. “We need to understand that the local police is competent in handling the situation,” he said.
It is no wonder then that over 5,000 children have gone missing in Chhattisgarh in the past decade, an alarming 70 percent of them girls. The parents of the victims get very little help from the administration and the search for missing children is almost entirely a family pursuit. A lot of parents, especially in the lower rungs of society, have learnt to cope with the danger in the only way they can; they seldom allow their children to venture out alone.

http://www.indianexpress.com/iep/sunday/story/23390.html

Tamil Nadu is home to adoption rackets and child-labour gangs

The Indian ExpressFeb 16,2007

CHENNAI, FEBRUARY 15 :• When E Kathirvel and Nagarani, pavement- dwellers in Pulianthope, woke up on an October morning in 1999, they found their 18 month-old son Sateesh missing. On May 3, 2005, police located the boy. But he had been legally adopted by the Bisessars, a Dutch couple, who had named him Anbu Rohit Bisessar and lived in Almere in the Netherlands. Sateesh spoke only Dutch. The police showed Nagarani a picture of the boy, pinned to a register of a Chennai-based adoption agency, Malaysian Social Service, which was being investigated. “We want him back,” said Nagarani. The police have sought the Centre’s help to bring back Nagarani’s child, now 9.
• Lakshmi Parveen lost 18-month-old Fathima in December 1998. Fathima too was stolen while asleep on a pavement. Seven years later, Varadarajan, an alcoholic who knew Lakshmi’s father, told her it was he who had stolen and sold the child for Rs 2,000. She took him to the police station and his confession uncovered a major adoption racket. Fathima was traced to Neyveli where she lives with her adopted parents. It was during this investigation that Nagarani’s son was traced to the Dutch couple.
If Tamil Nadu police prove that the more than 350 adoptions that Malaysian Social Service processed during 2000 were of children kidnapped from the slums, this could be one of the biggest cases of child trafficking to reach the courts. Booked in the case are P V Ravindranath (who died last year), his wife Vatsala, and son Dinesh Kumar, besides some brokers.
The police record of tracing missing children is, however, good. From 2003 to 2006, of the 8,681 children who went missing, 8,014 were “traced” and 667 were recorded as “untraced”. But much of the credit for the work goes to NGOs who run child helplines in 24 of its 30 districts and work in perfect tandem with police stations and child welfare committees (CWCs), which have been set up in 18 districts. The helplines have proved a lifeline for runaways and children abused where they work.
It was in April 2004 that the police HQ in Chennai provided space to two NGOs, the Indian Council for Child Welfare (ICCW) and Don Bosco, in their control room to supervise the child lines. The lines rarely stop ringing, thanks to a well-entrenched network of volunteers and enlightened members of the public, who immediately call the child line when they spot a child who appears to have run away. Since 1999, the organisations have been operating independent helplines too.
The government also has a Missing Child Bureau, under the Department of Social Justice, but the criticism it faces is that it is short-staffed and impeded by bureaucratic lethargy. However, it maintains a website with details of some 300 missing children.
ICCW’s joint secretary Girija Kumar Babu says: “The police in TN are more responsive and responsible than their counterparts in other states.” She said it wasn’t as if police always register cases on their own, but NGOs often play an active role and even help in locating children.
The police and NGOs are also focussing on railway and bus stations. Said T Alagappan, member of a Child Welfare Committee of Chennai, “Trains are the main refuge for runaways.” He gives the example of a girl who ran away from her home in Nepal in 1998 and went to Chennai. Apparently, she wanted to see actor Sridevi.
Many such children are restored by the committees to their parents. Some, like one Pratul from Pune, has refused to go back and now stays and studies in Anbu Illam, a home run by Don Bosco.
Said Chennai Police Commissioner Letika Saran, “We cannot take even a single case lightly. There is a huge risk to children wandering around on their own.”
But Tamil Nadu’s bane has been the alarming number of its children being trafficked, particularly from Cuddalore, Villupuram, Madurai Theni, Dindigul and Ramanathapuram, for labour and prostitution.
“Children of poor families flee villages to cities like Chennai, Madurai, Coimbatore and Tiruchy looking for work. Many of them end up in hotels and tea shops as cheap labour or on the roads begging, perhaps even part of an organised begging racket,” said a senior police officer.
In December last year, police bust a begging racket in Tiruchy on the tip-off from a 12-year-old boy who had been held for pick-pocketing. District Collector Ashish Vachani chatted up the boy at the remand home he was kept in and the boy described his horror tale of how he was taken away from his parents when he was seven and tortured with burning cigarettes into learning to pick pockets and steal.
The same night a police team raided two houses in Thiruverambur serving as hideouts for training kidnapped children in burglary and thievery. Four children, including one aged four months, from Nagaland, were freed. They are now in government homes.
“Not always are the police so responsive,” pointed out Vimal Raj, project coordinator of Cuddalore’s Child Line. In January 2006, nine-year-old Ezhilarasi was found with a raw burn wound on her left hand, which she said was caused when her employers poured hot water on her hand. Howling with pain at the Parangipettai bus stand, 30 kms from Cuddalore town the little girl was picked up by members of the public and handed over to the ICCW staff. She had run away from home a year ago, fearing scolding from her mother for beating up her younger brother. According to Vimal Raj, the girl was picked up while wandering around Chidambaram town by a man who sold her for Rs. 2,000 as a domestic worker to Basheer Ahmed, a businessman.
But Ezhilarasi’s woes didn’t end there. She wanted to go back home. “But, the Parangipettai station inspector refused to help. He disbelieved the girl’s story and asked us how her father’s name was Nataraj (a bullock cart puller living in Chidambaram town) when she herself was a Muslim girl,” said Vimal Raj. The ICCW approached the then Cuddalore District SP, Panneerselvam, and managed to reach the girl to her parents. “Now, she is back home and going to school again.”
In fact, the industrial belt in Cuddalore is notorious for touts who buy children from poor villagers and sell them to factory owners.
One such case was that of 14-year-old Lenin. He was purchased by a broker from his parents, Boopathy and Jyothilakshmi of Naduveeranpatti, 5 km from Cuddalore town, to work in a leather factor near Bangalore, with the promise that they would be given Rs 1,000 monthly for their son’s services. After about five months last year, Lenin’s parents wanted him to come home for Diwali. But the employer refused to send the boy. The monthly payments too stopped.
When the father went along with some relatives to meet the boy in the factory, he was told Lenin was not there. Even ICCW’s attempts to trace the boy failed, with the factory owner, whose relatives live in Cuddalore, claiming they had no clue of the boy’s whereabouts.
Said Tiruchy SP Ashok Kumar Das: “All the missing cases in the districts are kept alive. Whenever we get a case of a missing child, the information is immediately passed on to our seniors, who in turn inform the state police headquarters in Chennai and a state-wide search is activated.” People in TN are also very aware of their rights, pointed out the officer, comparing the scenario to Orissa, his home state.
“Once we got a case of two minor boys (brothers) running away from their home in Lalgudi (about 20 kms from Tiruchy). Even as we were trying to follow up the case, the father of the boys had dashed off petitions to the district Collector, DIG, DGP and even the Chief Minister,” said the SP. The two boys were finally traced to a factory in Bangalore, where they had been working. They were restored to their family. But information collated by the Crime Records Bureau for the year 2005 is quite disturbing.
Of the total 1,143 female children and 772 male children reported missing that year, 27 girls were kidnapped (probably for prostitution); a girl and a boy were trafficked; six girls and a boy kidnapped for begging on the streets; one boy child murdered (suspected to have been offered as sacrifice by a tantrik); 250 boys and 289 girls ran away from their homes after being scolded by their parents; 140 boys and 59 girls fled their homes after failing their examinations; five boys and seven girls ran away fearing arrest for petty acts of rebellion like throwing stones at their neighbour’s houses etc; and 170 boys and 263 girls were feared to have been lost during temple festivals and big gatherings and for “other reasons.”

http://www.indianexpress.com/iep/sunday/story/23467._.html

Nadia survey on child trafficking

The Telegraph Kolkata

Krishnagar, Feb. 6: Alarmed over increasing incidents of girl trafficking and awareness that many more might be going unreported, the Nadia administration has decided to find out the actual number of children to have gone missing over the past decade.
The survey, to begin next month, will also try to find out how many of those missing were forced into flesh trade or bonded labour.
This is the first time that such a database is being created, a district official said.
“We are certain that the actual number of missing persons is higher than the number registered with police,” district magistrate .S. Meena said.
Officials said a UNDP study had revealed that about 15 lakh girls had been trafficked from Bengal over the past 10 years.

In Nadia, the figure could run up to nearly 300,000.
The Telegraph had carried a series of reports on how girls were smuggled out of the state with the promise of a better life outside.
“For a 12 or 14-year-old girl from a labourer’s family that lives on at best Rs 1,500 a month, the lure of a job in Mumbai or Delhi, which can fetch up to Rs 1,200 a month is too much to resist,” an official said.
“These girls often go on their own. But in many cases, the parents push them into the unknown.”
Once in a while, Bengal police go to Mumbai, Pune, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh or Bihar to rescue them.
“After rescuing these girls, we often realise that their parents had not even lodged a missing complaint. We want to get to the bottom of why such disappearances are not registered. The survey will help us bust the rackets that are in operation,” Meena said.
The social welfare department and the police would jointly conduct the survey. “They will seek the help of the panchayats to trace unrecorded cases.”

Low crime rate in hill state yet kids disappear

Until Nithari was discovered, Himachal police had no regular data or team to trace missing children; now they maintain separate entries

Indian Express

SHIMLA, FEBRUARY 13 : • Ashish, 14, left home one February morning two years ago. The Class 8 student at the local Wood-Stone High School had just Rs 310 on him. He is not back yet. Carrying his son’s photograph, Aman Kumar, 44, has travelled to every corner of Himachal Pradesh, looking for the teenager.

But he hasn’t given up. “I must know where he is.” What he says he has given up on is any hope of help from the police. “The police haven’t called me even once after I filed a complaint two days after Bagga disappeared.”

• A 13-yr old girl went missing on January 8 last year from her village in Mandi. Her parents did not go to the police but looked for her in the area. They did this for 11 days. Just when the father, a farmer, was beginning to think that she may have eloped, he got a distress call from her in Manali. The police then rescued her from a hotel, where “she was subjected to sexual abuse”, says Chander Shekhar, SP of Mandi. The police later found that the girl was lured by her own aunt, who promised to marry her off to a Delhi boy, only to push her into prostitution.

Certain parts of Himachal Pradesh are perhaps as poor as any other in the country, but crime rate is low and there are never any reports of children being abandoned or sold by parents. Even so, 350-450 children are reported missing every year, according to data recently compiled by the police.

Since 2002, over 1,545 children have been missing. But till recently, there was no proper system to monitor missing children in police stations and at the district level. Post-Nithari, however, police stations in the state have been told to maintain separate registers of missing children, besides daily diaries.

“There was no system... being short-staffed, we had not set up special squads to trace missing children,” admitted I D Bhandari, the state’s Inspector-General of Police (CID). “The new procedure will help evolve a system of monitoring and investigating cases.”

The missing cells at state and district levels will be primarily handled by women police officers, said DGP Ashwani Kumar.

But that’s for future. For now, the police say they haven’t seen any set pattern in the disappearances and give the usual reasons — lack of interest in studies or unhappiness with life at home leading to children running away.

They say there are no cases of parents selling children, child sacrifice, gangs picking up minors for abuse or begging.

The odd kidnappings usually involve migrants from Bihar and Nepal, said Kumar.

But Solan, an industrial hub, seems to have a problem. It has shown an increase in the number of disappearances, from three in 2001 to 11 in 2006. In all, 51 children disappeared during the five-year period.

Gulshan, the 14-year-old son of a chowkidar from Nalagarh, went missing in March last year. After three months, he was traced to Ludhiana. He was working in a cycle factory.

Similarly, Anil Kumar, 13, who ran away last August, was found a fortnight later. He too was working in a factory.

One major cause for concern, say police, is adolescents running away to take up jobs at dhabas or factories in order to support their drug habit. They say only 2-5 per cent of the missing are below 10.

Then there are girls who land in prostitution rackets, lured away with the promise of jobs or careers in films or modelling. “Acquaintances promised us a chance in films. I was not happy with life here and the lack of opportunities. So I went to seek fame,” One of the three girls who ran away together a decade back told The Indian Express.

“But soon I realized it was a mad act. If we had not returned, we would have been pushed into hell.”

Says O P Monga, a professor of sociology at Himachal Pradesh University, “Outside gangs running prostitution rackets have an eye on Himachali boys and girls, mainly adolescents. A few escape the trap, many are pushed into the trade.” Boys running away from the homes are mainly school drop-outs, or children fed up with conditions at home, say social worker here. In Gumerwin, Rakesh, 11, fled his abusive father in 1999 but returned home after four years. He worked at a dhaba in Kangra and saved nearly Rs 2,000 for the family.

The story of Sonu, part of a family from Bihar now settled at Pakloh near Dalhousie, has no such happy ending. In 2002, the 12-year-old was taken by a sadhu on Manimahesh yatra as a “helper”. Six moths later, when father Rajesh went to see his son at the sadhu’s ashram, he was told that Sonu had run away three months ago.

Rajesh is still looking for Sonu, as he ekes out a living by selling balloons and toys by the roadside.

ashwani.sharma@expressindia.com

INVESTIGATION Kids go missing from homes, cops say no gangs here, they’ll return

Indian Express, Madhya Pradesh

BHOPAL, february 10:• Vishal Talreja went missing from outside his home in Indore's Sudamanagar on a Friday evening in 1998 when he was three-and-a-half years old. He was playing with his elder sister, Harshal, when she went inside for a cup of tea. “When I came out after five minutes he was not there,” says Harshal, now 14. The family believes if they had more money, the police would have done much more.

• Amjad, 11, went missing five years ago after he left his house in Bhopal's Kazi Mohalla to offer namaz. His father, Kudrat Noor, had married for the second time at the age of 65 because he had no issue from the previous marriage. Now 81, Noor has seen a body exhumed and being labelled as his son's. He did not identify it nor did two DNA tests help. The octogenarian father says his son is alive but doesn't know where to look for him.

• Faizal, a 12-year-old mute boy, went missing on December 12 from his house near Akhadewali mosque near Bhopal Railway Station. “Ham kahan dhundne jayenge, tumhi dhund lo (where will we search, you look for him yourself),” the police told Nasir Khan, his 63-year-old grandfather. “There is no day that I don't look for him,” Khan said after returning from Sehore where he was told a beggar resembling Faizal was seen.

The police can't show more concern. There are no beggar gangs, no organised flesh trade, no flourishing kidnapping racket in Madhya Pradesh so when a child goes missing, the police wait for her to return home. After all, most of them run away because of trouble at home, poverty or love affairs. A missing child, they say, is last on the priority list, unless the parents are influential.

In spite of this defence, the fact is that children as young as three years old or girls entering their teens go missing right from their homes; yet, the state has no special squad to trace them.

Beat constables from every police station are expected to deal with cases of missing persons. The Criminal Investigation Department acts as a nodal agency by forwarding details to every station once it receives a complaint from a particular police station.

As of December 31 last year, the number of untraced children in MP was 1913, a figure even the police officers don't believe.

Archana Sahay of Childline, too, contests the figures but says the police alone can't be blamed. Only last year, her organisation rescued 226 children from Bhopal alone and found that there were no police complaints when it tried to reunite them with parents.

She, however, criticises the police for their attitude towards missing children. “They can't deny their role because they are the ones who are contacted first. They have an organisational structure and the means to deal with the issue,” she says. Girls, she says, are sent to other states while children are forced to become drug peddlers. “The police simply can't outrightly reject the presence of gangs.”

Manju, mother of Vishal Talreja, however, has faced just that with the police. “The police did nothing to trace him,” she says, recalling how the family chased false leads and looked for him as far as Allahabad.

The Madhya Pradesh police deny gangs operating against children but according to the National Crime Records Bureau, the state accounts for 22.9 per cent of the crime against children in the country.

Former DGP SC Tripathi says there may be sporadic incidents but no gangs operated in the state, “at least, it has never come to light”. According to him, the number of missing children must be more because parents in tribal-dominated areas don't register disappearances.

Additional DGP (CID) Vijay Raman describes it as a social problem. “Society should look within rather than blame the police for missing children,” he says. “Leave us to policing and to tackle crime as defined under the IPC. If the society thinks missing children is a crime it should articulate the system it wants to have to prevent it.”

District superintendents of police too say there are no alarming trends anywhere in the state. Most missing cases have a lot to do with love affairs, they say. The problem is there is no investigation even when numbers warrant immediate attention.

Take a small district like Khandwa, for instance. 920 children went missing here in 2002. Of them, 252 were girls and could not be traced at the end of that year. In the next year too, 81 remained untraced. The figures are carried forward and as of last year, 108 girls still remain untraced. Villagers believe the girls could have been lured into prostitution to operate in neighbouring Burhanpur, the only organised red light area in the state, and from there to Mumbai's brothels.

The police have their own argument. “Parents don't inform us even when the girls return home, to avoid getting a bad name for the family,” IG (Indore) Rajendra Kumar said.

Most missing children are reported from Bhopal, Indore, Jabalpur, Gwalior, Chhindwara, Ujjain and Khandwa. Few cases are reported from smaller towns and tribal areas though the number could be much more.

Nirmala Buch, who started Mahila Chetna Manch, after retiring as chief secretary said, “it's not a big issue in a state like MP only because gang of child lifters generally operate in industrialised or commercial areas”. Her organisation is active in 12 of the 48 districts but has not come across any trend in missing children.

Rajasthan’s missing cell: Our job is to collect data, we do it every month

Indian Express Jaipur,

February 8: • Hope abandoned this single-room house in Chittorgarh years ago. Now Ratanlal Mali, his wife and three children do not expect to see Seema again, three years after the eldest child went missing. She was 13 then. Ironically, the two accused in the kidnapping are a police constable and his wife. Vinod Kumar, who was arrested but freed on bail later, continues to be in the police. And in this fact lies the despair of the poor Mali family.

• On September 9, 2005, Amina Maniyar’s daughter Aabida, then 15, did not return home from work. The mother went to the police to report the girl missing. “Bhaag gai hogi,” the police told her. Then she went again and again, over a year. “Bhool ja usey,” she was told. Amina says the police may be right that Aabida ran away but as a mother, she can’t live peacefully on that assumption. “I must know if she is safe.”

WHEN it comes to bearing the pain of a missing child and feeling totally helpless about it, a Ratanlal or an Amina has large company. Since 2001, 1,029 children are reported missing from across Rajasthan. And these are official figures, confirmed by the police at the district level. But senior police officials claim that the actual figure might be smaller. The reason: once a child comes back, nobody bothers to report it to the police, they say.

Leaving the “accurate” number aside, what the data here show is that on an average, 170 kids go missing in Rajasthan every year, or one child every two days. And nearly an eighth of this number is cases of kidnapping.

Backed by these numbers, the police believe that most of the missing kids actually run away following a conflict at home or in search of a better life. When the police say 15-year-old Aabida may have eloped, they have a little over 18 per cent chance of being correct. Two in 10 girls who go missing do in search of better life as a model or an actor, said a social worker here. Another two out of 10, mainly between ages 14 and 17, run away to get married.

Cases are registered only when there is a suspected kidnapping, but often there is no clear answer to who ran away and who was kidnapped.

“In more than 90 per cent cases, the children have run away from home after a fight. And most of them come back once their money runs out or their anger subsides,” says A K Jain, addition DGP of crime. “But the parents don’t bother to inform the police.”

M L Chowdhry, who runs the Gram Vikas Sewa Sanstha, a Johpur-based organisation working with street children, agrees. “Most children run away in search of a better life. They may be poor, have an abusive father or a sex-worker mother. And most of them do not come back if they earn enough to for two meals a day.”

But tell this to Seema’s family. Constable Vinod Kumar was posted at Udaipur while his wife lived at Chittorgardh. She often called Seema over for house work. On July 28, 2004, Seema was at her employer’s house. “After sometime, the lady came to our house, claiming that Seema had stolen her gold earrings and had gone missing,” says Ratanlal.

“She told us that her husband, who was in town then, was searching for her,” says the daily-wager.

Initially, the police in Chittorgarh refused to file a complaint. But the Malis went to the SP, where an FIR was lodged. Kumar was arrested and later freed on bail. He continues to be in service, currently stationed at Baswada.

Or try convincing Amina Maniyar, who is still waiting for Aabida. She may be among the 82 per cent girls who go missing but have not “eloped”. But there seems to be no way to ascertain that.

Rajasthan does have a missing persons cell, though. It is a lean affair, with one sub-inspector and a couple of administrative staff to man it. It is hard to expect this cell to go looking for missing persons when you get to know that the data the cell maintained was updated only after the Rajasthan High Court demanded to know how many children were missing in the state in the last three years.

The court has directed the CBI to look for 502 missing children, Half of the actual figure in the state.

All this full-time cell does is send pictures and details of missing persons for ads on television and in newspapers. These ads get displayed for a week, after which they are forgotten. The authorities here make it clear at the very outset that it is called a “cell” but “isn’t one actually”.

“Finding a child is not easy. Even if one deploys 10 policemen, they may not be able to trace the child because he might be in any corner of India,” says Jain.

“The cell can’t find the children. Anyway, it is the duty of the district police and that too is quite difficult because in several cases people don’t even have a photograph of the missing person,” Jain says.

Over at the one-man cell, in-charge Anwar Khan says: “Our job here is to collect the data, which we do every month.”

Found, somehow

JAIPUR: A trip to the Railway Station in November 2005 became a nightmare for Prem Chand, who works at construction sites in Jaipur. He had gone there to show trains and engines to his then 12-year-old son Tarun. However, Tarun got lost somewhere in the crowd, and the father could not trace him. After waiting for a day, Prem filed a complaint. “When I first went to the police, they insisted that I must have beaten up the boy and he must have run away from home,” he says. Meanwhile, somebody found Tarun crying near a train and thinking that his parents might be on the train, made him board it. “I go in to see if I could find papa,” says Tarun. But the train took him to Delhi. Someone at the station told Tarun he would take him to Jaipur, but sent him with someone else, who in turn handed Tarun over to a man named Sharifbhai in Noida.

“I worked at a tea stall for four days before one Rakesh came there and saw me crying. He fought with the stall owner and brought me back home,” says Tarun.

Andhra’s girls vanish, many to Maharashtra’s brothels

Most cases go unreported, officials say 40 per cent of trafficking cases are from Andhra


Indian Express HYDERABAD, FEBRUARY 7 : Sarla was 10 when she left her house in Andhra Pradesh’s Khammam district. Her elder sister Lakshmi took her by train to Maharashtra, where she was passed on to another girl, who promised to employ her as a domestic help.

Instead, she was taken to a brothel, and sold to the ‘madam’ for Rs 2,000.

She spent the next few years changing hands, going from one owner to another. Her last ‘employer’ was Mrs. Trivedi. “We used to live with her. She would take us to picnics with men who we didn’t know. This happened very often. We were not given any money, but instead given food and clothes,” says Sarla.

She is now 15. And back.

That’s not a usual story in a state where over half of the missing children are never traced. An estimated 3,497 children, a majority of them girls, went missing last year and only 1,585 were recovered.

Sarla (name changed) was fortunate. She was rescued from Vani in Maharashtra’s Yavatmal by a team of Mumbai police. She was put up at a shelter in Mumbai and discovered by an Andhra police officer who visited the home to work out a system of sharing information with his Mumbai counterparts.

The police brought her back to Khammam, cracked down on the trafficking ring, arrested five women who ran it and rescued 37 girls who took the same route. As many as 10 of them are still minors.

Five years after going missing, cases of kidnapping and trafficking were registered for Sarla.

It’s the same story for Lekha, 16. She, too, was promised a job in Maharashtra and ended up in a Vani brothel. Lekha (name changed) has been rescued and is now at a counselling centre in Hyderabad, waiting for her HIV test results. In her Khammam village, no case was registered when she disappeared.

R K Meena, SP, Khammam, says parents are reluctant to register cases in rural Andhra, because of poverty, ignorance and illiteracy. “There is also a stigma associated with a missing girl. They know that if a case is filed, then police will come asking questions, and they do not want this,” he says.

Officials working against human trafficking say that Andhra Pradesh is a major supplier of girls for prostitution across the country.

Padma, recently arrested by Khammam police in Vani, Maharashtra says: “There are a lot of girls from AP in Vani.” While the police allege that she herself dealt in minor girls, she refutes it. “We too were forced into this business¿ why will we sell minors? Yes, we do trade in other girls. The other brothels around us do get children from AP. But it’s not our fault. It’s their own parents and siblings who come to sell them,” she says.

SP of the Women’s Protection cell in Hyderabad, Mahesh Bhagwat, says that many red-light areas prefer girls from AP.

In Andhra Pradesh, records show that the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secundrabad have the highest number of missing children in the state. In 2006, 1,031 of the 3,497 missing children were from here, and another 766 from neighbouring Cyberabad. Meena says that as labourers from rural areas migrate to the cty in search of jobs, many of their children are left unattended. Most of those missing are, in fact, from the lower strata of society.

Officials say that problem is worst in Khammam, Warangal, Adilabad as well as the coastal East and West Godawari districts. As in the recent case where 37 girls were recovered in Maharashtra, most of the minors that go missing are not reported in the state.

“In AP, the problem of missing children is compounded by factors like illiteracy. Social systems like the Devadasi system also endorse prostitution, making the police’s job harder,” says Union Women and Child Development minister (and Khammam MP) Renuka Choudhary. According to Choudhary, almost 40 per cent of trafficking originates in AP. Police officials say that there has been no survey to gauge how much trafficking originates from AP, but they place the figure “around 25-30 %.”

While Childline Hyderabad’s Isidore Phillips agrees that a large number of children that go missing from AP are trafficked, he says, “It’s not just trafficking for prostitution. There is also trafficking for labour, which is rampant. And while attaching the label of trafficking, we should not lose out on kidnapping for ransom.”

Phillips, who deals with a large number of missing children in Hyderabad, says, “There is a vast gap between reported and unreported cases. The police are reluctant to register FIRs for missing children. The Juvenile Justice act says that every police station must have a Special Juvenile police Unit and a Child Welfare Officer. This is non-existent.”

The state has no special team to tackle the problem of missing children. “We have no special team to find missing people,” says M. Ratan, Addl. Director General, CID (which deals with missing people).

“We can’t have a special unit for every different activity. It is the job of the local police and the SP of the district to find missing people,” he says.

Every fortnight, the CID compiles a list of missing people, along with photographs, and circulates it to all police stations as well as neighbouring states. T Krishna Prasad, who as Additional Director of the AP Police Academy trained three new Anti-Human Trafficking Units, says, “From the searching point of view, there is an issue. Something is missing¿ everyone is concentrating on sending, not on searching. We send pictures to districts, but nothing happens after that. There is no systematic approach to search for missing people. It’s not a job that police can do effectively. We should possibly employ some NGO for the job along with incentives.”

Other than trafficking for labour and prostitution, children from AP are also forced into begging or kidnapping. Though there have been cases of children being sent to the Gulf as child camel-jockeys, officials say such cases are difficult to track down, as parents are involved.

Poverty and crime throw Bihar kids to ransom gangs, labour agents

INDIAN EXPRESS PATNA,

FEBRUARY 6 : • On November 14 last year, 13-year-old Deepak Kumar, son of a railway employee, set out from home but never reached school. Police said he had run away but then the family got a ransom call. The family driver became the prime suspect and police detained his wife. On January 10, the remains of the boy were recovered from a forest in Jharkhand.

• When his son Lalu, 13, was offered a job in a vermilion factory in Delhi, Dolai Paswan of Kushiar in Araria was happy. He felt the boy’s income would help. After all, he and his wife had nine children. For over a year, the boy used to send money home. Then he stopped. The family was told that Lalu had run away. Dolai never lodged a case. He doesn’t even have a photograph of his son. “My son had gone with another boy. His father told me not to lodge a case. He said my son would return some day,” said Dolai.

If Mumbai is the “final destination” of children gone missing, Bihar is perhaps the starting point of that journey. For, it is here, in this poverty-stricken state, that the collapse of the law and order machinery has allowed crime to flourish as a cottage industry: kidnapping-for-ransom is rampant, flesh traders move freely and children from poor homes are packed off to cities as cheap labour where they work as domestic helps or, like Lalu Paswan, in small factories.

Once the children go missing, parents rarely file cases — many fear they will get into trouble because it was they who had let the agents take them away, hoping some money would come home every month.

Some are too poor to even have photographs to hand over to police.

Kidnappings often involve two or three gangs, which coordinate operations in which one gang abducts, another gang hold the victim, moving him from place to place to avoid detection, and still another gang collects the ransom, which is shared.

Most families pay up, especially if the victim is a boy. Police say it is very rarely that girls are kidnapped for ransom.

The Patna High Court, while hearing a PIL on kidnappings, sought figures from district judges. Statistics showed that over 1,800 kidnapping cases were lodged in 2006 and 1,697 in 2005. This year, the figure stands at 143. But these figures, officials admit, are only a fraction of what’s happening on the ground. Most cases go unreported.

When Gaurav Kumar alias Golu (10) of Patna’s DAV School was kidnapped in 2005, there were large-scale protests.

According to police, he was picked up by a small gang while returning from school and handed over to a second gang and, finally, to a gang operating both in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh led by one Guddu Rai.

“Police took a lot of time to recover the boy since more than one gang was involved in the kidnapping,” said a police officer involved in the search operation.

Golu was lucky. Since 2001, 44 children have been killed by their captors.

It is feared that many children who remain untraced may have been killed. “Gangs bury bodies in river beds, making it extremely difficult to trace them,” said a police officer.

While abduction-for-ransom is now an industry, the state police neither have a special cell to crack down on gangs or trace missing children. A Missing Persons Cell under the CID is virtually defunct.

But Director General of Police Asish Ranjan Sinha maintains “the entire police force is engaged in cracking down on organised gangs. Nobody is being spared. There has been a marked change in the safety and security atmosphere of the state as a result of police action.”

But that gives no hope to Saraswati Devi whose son disappeared over a year ago. She says that when she approached a Danapur police official, he told her: “This case is not mine. Your son has run away. What can I do? Can you spend money?”

Advocate M P Gupta, who moved the High Court on the kidnapping of children, says the police get into the act only when it’s a high-profile case. “Police act with determination only in cases that are high profile and generate a media outcry. As for other cases, they just sit over it,” he said.

As for children who go missing after being handed over to labour agents — most end up at dhabas, construction sites in Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi — virtually nothing is done. Cases are rarely filed.

Sakunia Devi has waited five years now for her son Dusay Kumar to return. After her husband died, he gave up studies and came in contact with a contractor who promised him a job in Punjab. Within a few months, he sent home a money order of Rs 1,000.

But after that, no one heard from him Other boys from the village said he had run away.

After the Nithari incident, Bhoomika Bihar, an non-governmental organisation working to prevent trafficking in girls, received a number of complaints of Bihari boys missing from the states they had gone to work in.

A survey of 15 panchayats in Araria and Katihar districts had this result: 194 boys, all minors, missing. Of these, 109 had been taken away for jobs, the rest had run away.

“Labour contractors exploit the acute poverty in the region. They pay money to parents and take away the children, promising jobs outside the state,” says Arun Singh of Bhoomika Bihar.

That missing children is not high on the priority list of the state government is evident from the fact that there are no figures for the number of labourers, adults or minors, migrating from Bihar.

http://www.indianexpress.com/story/22709.html

Soon, NHRC norms for the missing

New Delhi: : Following the gruesome Nithari serial murders — mostly of missing children — the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has decided to formulate guidelines for the police to tackle cases of missing persons throughout the country.

Acting chairperson of NHRC Justice Shivraj V. Patil said “the Commission would soon deliberate on this important human rights matter and issue a set of guidelines for the police.” The Commission, he said, could recommend what efforts the police must make in tracing the missing persons.

Criticising the government for neglecting children, Patil said the budget for “children’s causes” in India was almost “negligible.” “This amounts to hypocrisy. Why are we feeling ashamed of allocating liberal funds for children?” he said while concluding a two-day conference on juvenile justice system.

The conference attended by legal experts and officials from states and the Centre explored loopholes into the juvenile justice system in the country.

Patil said since the implementation of juvenile justice laws by most states was tardy, the NHRC would play a more pro-active role in ensuring the monitoring of their implementation. To begin with, the Commission would call a meeting of all NGOs working for children’s rights to focus on their role in acting as the watchdog for implementation of the plethora of laws India has on children.

The Commission, he said, would also crack the whip on the states that are dragging their feet on implementation of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Amendment Act, 2006. The amended law makes it mandatory for the states to set up Juvenile Justice Boards and protection homes at district levels.

The conference strongly recommended that justice for juveniles should be completely delinked from the mainstream justice since “children cannot be treated as offenders.” Patil even suggested that juveniles should be let out on bail on furnishing personal bonds and saved from being put into institutionalised custody for long.”

Another key suggestion at the conference was about the need to involve children in deciding policies and laws that effect them directly.

http://www.indianexpress.com/story/22557.html

3,000 missing children, number of staff in Gujarat missing cell: 2

Vikram Rautela / Sreenivas Janyala

AHMEDABAD, FEBRUARY 4: A curious nine-year-old Mukesh Vanzara ventured out of his home in Asarwa on September 6 last year to watch a religious procession. Still in his school uniform, that was the last his mother saw of him. Since then, it has been countless rounds to the Shahibaug police station for the poor and completely broken Vanzaras. The police first refused to acknowledge a complaint, then Mukesh’s Asarwa Municipal School intervened and filed one on behalf of the Vanzaras. With no word from the police, father Madanlal, who works as labourer, searched all over north Gujarat, even visited his village in Rajasthan to look for his son. Mukesh’s mother Narmada, who is a cart-puller, has, in fact, contacted so many people that she has exhausted all photographs of Mukesh. With only one photo left, the couple gets photocopies made. They want the police to put up posters of Mukesh’s photo which his school has prepared but with the police not taking any interest, Narmada’s meagre earnings of Rs 50 now go into making photocopies of the poster. She pastes it wherever she goes.

Jayanti Chauhan, 15, went missing on March 8, 2006. For his poor parents, both of whom work, it is a dilemma — if they go searching for him, the family, including Jayanti’s sister and 80-year-old grandfather, will starve. Still, they have been knocking on Vatwa police’s doors. The day Jayanti went missing, father Vishnu Chauhan went to Vatwa police to lodge a complaint. Instead of registering his complaint, Chauhan was told to wait for a “couple of days’’. A few days later, after persistent efforts by Chauhan, the police registered a complaint. Though Chauhan kept visiting the police station, he has never been informed what the police have done to trace his son. In September, 2006, a policeman came home to ask if the boy had returned. “If he returns, just inform the police station,’’ he said and went away.

Scrutiny of records shows that Gujarat’s children go missing while going or coming from school or playing near their home or in crowds at marriages or religious processions. Between 2001 and 2005, 1,054 children in the age group of 6 months to 18 years, were reported missing. Figures for 2006 are being compiled while according to police records in the past 15 years, 2,896 children have been reported missing and not found from various cities and districts of Gujarat. More than 80% go missing from urban areas.

Interviews with police officers and parents and an analysis of official records shows that while there is no clear pattern in the missing children, the following trends can be discerned:

n In south Gujarat, Surat and Valsad, children are mostly lured by peer groups. The boys are promised jobs in restaurants in Mumbai or to work as extras in films. Girls usually end up in prostitution rings. Surat district in Gujarat tops the list of missing persons — 1075 in the last 15 years. Says Surat’s former police commissioner Sudhir Sinha and now Additional Director General of Police (Intelligence): “Children missing from this area are either picked up or lured by agents with promises of jobs or a better life. But they mostly end up as child labour or bonded labour. Girls are sold off to prostitution rings. In a number of cases, the children are simply fed up of abusive parents or dismal living conditions and run away from home. Children of migrant labourers who are forced to live with 10 or 15 others in a single room are often found missing and form the largest group of missing persons. Their nearest destination again is Mumbai.’’

• From north Gujarat, missing children usually end up in cities like Ahmedabad or Vadodara where they join beggar gangs or are forced to work at roadside tea-stalls.

• In Saurashtra, the needle of suspicion points to quack doctors and tantriks. At least 16 cases have been registered between 2001 and 2006 in Rajkot, Junagadh, Surendranagar and Jamnagar where “tantriks” were involved in “lifting children.”

“We can understand where missing children from Gujarat end up by looking at the condition of children from other states who end up in Gujarat. They are into begging gangs in which five and eight-year-olds, both girls and boys, are forced to beg by their seths, ragpicker gangs, prostitution rings and human trafficking rackets,’’ says Chaya Joshi, who runs Childline, an Ahmedabad NGO, which rescues such children.

“Girls and boys as young as five are sexually abused by employers who bring them as servants. They are often brought here by agents from whom the employers buy,’’ she says. ‘’They are so young when they are brought here that they don’t remember where they belong or who their parents are,’’ she says. Childline recently rescued two girls, Rekha, 8, and Shobha, 5, who were found loitering in Ahmedabad. Rekha, who is believed to have come from Mumbai, was found to have been sexually abused. Both girls now live in a residential school near Mehsana.

Shubham, a 10-year-old boy from Nagpur, was not only forced to beg but also work as a domestic help by his employer in Rakhial area of Ahmedabad. Talking to counsellors, Shubham revealed that his employer sodomised him regularly at knife-point. After coming to know of the extent of his abuse, he was sent for a HIV test which turned out to be negative. The mere mention of his employer’s name frightens Shubham. “He used to force me to drink and inhale charas sometimes. He would threaten me with a knife at my throat and did lots of things to me,’’ Shubham says and falls silent.

While it is difficult to trace a missing child who is unable to give his or her address, the police system makes it almost impossible. It begins with no FIRs being lodged in missing complaints. Says G C Raigar, Director General of Police (Home Guards) who also holds charge of the State Missing Children Cell: “As such, a missing complaint is not a crime complaint. Missing cases are not investigated as an offence because there is no crime involved per se unless it is a confirmed case of kidnapping. Obviously, current and serious issues take precedence over missing complaints. Not even an FIR is registered and priority is very low.’’

Gujarat does have a Missing Persons Cell at Gandhinagar but it’s all of two people, a police inspector and a constable. So the cell only compiles information on missing persons collected from various district headquarters. Because of lack of personnel, the cell ends up investigating only those cases on priority which are directed by the High Court, or if instructed by Home Department, Director General of Police or the Chief Minister’s office.

Says Inspector J B Solanki, who relinquished charge of the cell last week: “With two people, it is very difficult to keep track of cases and do a satisfactory investigation. We only issue look-out notices, stick posters.”

In Ahmedabad, a five-member squad was set up two years ago under the Prevention of Crime Branch (PCB) which deals with missing persons. However, tracing missing persons is very low on its priority. “The members are mainly on VIP security duty or festival bandobast. We try to do our best but shortage of man-power is a major obstacle,’’ an official said.

However, in reality, it’s the police themselves who discourage parents from filing complaints. Take the case of nine-year-old Mukesh Vanzara. “When we went to Shahbaug police station, instead of registering the complaint immediately, police asked us to wait if my son returns on his own,’’ says Narmada Vanzara, his mother. “The police did not help us in searching the places where we thought he could be. My husband and I searched ourselves. Even today, four months later, when we go to the police station, many times they refuse to meet us.”

Says missing 15-year-old Jayanti’s grandfather Kantilal Chauhan: “When I go to the police station, the police in turn asks me if my grandson has returned. They are of no help. When I persist, they get angry and say my grandson is not the only missing case and they have better things to do.’’

Even when a proper complaint is registered, the biggest impediment is police investigation itself.

“In Gujarat, there is no system or mechanism in place by which a missing complaint filed at one police station is relayed to another even in the same city. If the complaint is registered at one police station and another police station finds the child, they are absolutely clueless about him or her. They wouldn’t have the information that a particular child is reported missing from the neighbouring police station a few kilometres away. If coordination within a city is so poor, you can imagine how difficult it is at intra-state or inter-state level’’ says ADG (Intelligence) Sudhir Sinha.

“What is probably needed is a special agency or coordination cell which exclusively deals with missing persons with a dedicated staff. That should not improve inter-state exchange of information but given timely tip-offs or notices, it will surely help in detecting a number of cases,’’ Sinha says.

The Police Manual itself does not give much importance to dealing with cases of missing persons or unidentified bodies. In Gujarat, in case of a missing complaint, not even a proper FIR is lodged. There is no system of investigating officers reporting the progress of investigation to their seniors.

http://www.indianexpress.com/story/22551._.html

Flesh trade to beggar mafia: Mumbai capital for missing children

Stavan Desai / Sagnik Chowdhury / Smita Nair

Indian Express February 6

MUMBAI, FEBRUARY 5: • For over three years now, the Agarwals in central Mumbai have been waiting for their son Raj. A Class IX student, he never returned from school on November 18, 2003. That same day, his mother Arti received a ransom call for Rs 5 crore. A police team camped at their home, monitored calls and Rs 5 lakh was agreed upon to trap the ‘kidnappers’. The ransom was paid but Raj never got back. Agarwal moved the Bombay High Court which issued notice to the police on March 3, 2004. The very next day, police arrested five persons who they claimed had abducted and killed Raj near Pune. Agarwal was told that some skeletal remains had been found. But DNA tests concluded that the remains were not Raj’s. Mumbai Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Meeran Borwankar conducted a separate inquiry and, in a two-page report, saying the accused had been arrested and that allegations of faulty investigations were untrue. Raj remains untraced, his father still fighting in court.


• Jabeer was abducted from a mosque in Darukhana in December 2004. Two women befriended his mother, distracted her and ran away with the child. The police closed the case after making two rounds of the mosque and taking the parents to the police remand home for kids. The sketch of a woman was circulated but Jabeer Sheikh remains a ‘missing minor’ entry in the Sewree police register.

Maximum city Mumbai is also number one when it comes to missing children. In 2006 alone, Mumbai’s missing minor registers recorded 948 children as untraced. According to the Missing Persons Bureau of the Mumbai Police, over 2,307 children have remained untraced in the last three years. Since 2002, more than 650 children, on an average, remain untraced each year.

“If you ask me honestly, missing children and kidnapped children are not really looked at seriously. There isn’t a set pattern that has been observed here. But yes, child trafficking has gone up, including sex trade. Mumbai, therefore, becomes a hub as it has a large red-light area,” says IGP (Nashik range) P K Jain.

Nilima Mehta, former chairperson of the Child Welfare Committee, says there are three major areas of concern: “Child labour, flesh trade, trafficking of children for other activities abroad.” The city’s beggar mafia itself, say child welfare activists, is another menace with children absorbed “through abduction from the city or the outskirts” for begging, especially during festivals.

But Mumbai Police commissioner A N Roy doesn’t think the situation is very alarming: “Children go missing in every city and I am not concerned about the number of cases.

A large number of missing complaints are registered every year, but most cases are detected and children are returned home. Being such a large city, a high number of cases is only to be expected.”

What Roy doesn’t say is that Mumbai has been partly responsible for India being placed in Tier 2 of the human trafficking watchlist by the US Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons — “The result of its failure to demonstrate increased Central government law enforcement response to India’s huge trafficking problem and inadequate local prosecutions in Mumbai and Calcutta.”

Those working on the ground are not surprised. Preeti Patkar, working with Prerna which is involved in rescue and rehabilitation of women and children, says “Mumbai today forms the source, transit and destination for missing children.” According to Patkar, majority flesh trade cases involve those in the age group 14 to 16 and the children are either sent to Mumbai or “are taken to Mumbai for a halt before being sent to the Gulf.”

Naval Bajaj, former DCP (Zone I), says: “It’s always difficult to detect girls being taken abroad because prima-facie they are accompanied by a relative or friend. They are also shown as going for jobs there. So it becomes difficult to stop them legally.”

Vikas Sawant of Pratham, an NGO looking into the begging network in the city, says: “Most children come from the northern states.” Pratham coordinator Kishore Bhamre points out that “it is difficult to bust the beggar mafia because they are always mobile”.

Despite laws in place, child labour is still rampant. “Barely one or two per cent of the children are from Maharashtra. Most here are from Bihar, UP and Delhi,” says Sawant.

Social workers say while poverty forces many parents to make their children work, at least 40 per cent are those who went missing or fled home. Vaishali Canisius, anti-trafficking in-charge from Save our Sisters, says Mumbai has become a destination point for trafficking within the country as also girls from Nepal and Bangladesh.

According to Patkar, flesh trade has seen a change in recent years. “Earlier, one had Kamathipura and South Mumbai as the red-light areas where a missing or abducted girl would eventually end. Today, they are distributed in a city which now has massage parlours, friendship clubs and a huge porn industry.”

Mumbai Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Meeran Borwankar says “most children who remain untraced hail from a low socio-economic strata. The two main angles probed by the police in these cases are child trafficking and the begging racket. While trafficking is normally limited to girls, boys are made to beg on the streets.”

So is it easy losing a child in Mumbai? “Not really. Most children who leave home are lured by the glamour this city has to offer. They come to Mumbai thinking they will make it big here,” says Shaila Mhatre, chairperson of Child Welfare Committee. It is when they reach the city, in trains and buses, that children are pushed into all kinds of illegal trade.

Bhamre says not all is lost. He cites the case of 10-year-old Balaji who was found by GRP constables at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. The child couldn’t board the train to Aurangabad while his uncle did. Balaji boarded another train and reached Mumbai. “Patrolling agencies like the GRP look for children wandering aimlessly at railway stations. He was brought to the shelter.” If such agencies, says Bhamre, were functional at bus depots too, many children can be saved.

In July 2006, Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh had formed a state level committee to combat trafficking in women and children. As part of the “Make Maharashtra a safe state” agenda, work was to begin in seven districts — Sangli, Beed, Latur, Mumbai, Pune, Aurangabad and Osmanabad, high on the trafficking list. Deshmukh promised strict vigilance and rehabilitation measures. Six months later, the draft plan has been approved but is still awaiting implementation.

Just how high on the priority list are missing children? Mumbai Joint Commissioner of Police (Law and Order) Arup Patnaik says “It’s a matter of fixing priorities. While we do investigate missing cases at local police stations, our main task is to maintain order in the city, check serious crimes.”

(With Ashutosh Patil, Smita Nair)

http://www.indianexpress.com/story/22631.html
stavan.desai@expressindia.com