63 per cent of city’s missing kids never get traced: Report

New Delhi: At least 63 per cent children, gone missing in Delhi in the last five years, remain untraced, much higher than the data received from the rest of the country.

According to a report released by the Alliance for People’s Rights (APR) and NGO Child Rights and You (CRY), as many as 26,761 children went missing in Delhi in the last five years, and of them only 9,727 could be traced. In fact, as per statistics, out of every 10 children going missing in the national capital currently, six remain untraced.

In 2017, an average of 18 children went missing in Delhi every day with areas like Narela, Samaypur Badli, and Shahbad Dairy topping the list.

However, according to the report based on NCRB data and RTI replies from police, the rate of missing children has gone down significantly from 22 going missing every day in 2015 to 18 daily in 2017.     

“The data reveals that there is a decrease in the total number of missing children in Delhi in comparison to previous year... But in terms of tracing missing children, Delhi is the worst and this should be critically taken care of by the authorities,” the report suggested. To ensu-re that a robust preventive mechanism is in place, a model system was introduced by APR and CRY in the form of community vigilance.

Reena Banerjee, the state convenor of APR, said by forming a strong security net around children, their safety can be ascertained to a large extent, which is evident from the fact that there have been close to no incident of a child gone missing over the past two years within the communities that have engaged with the idea of forming vigilance groups.

“In a couple of instances where a child was found to be missing, the vigilance groups were able to take immediate action to notify the authorities which ensured early recovery of the child,” she said.

The report also revealed that the number of missing children in the age group of 12-18 years is the highest and among it the number of girls are much more than boys.

The reasons include child labo-ur, commercial sex work, forced marriage, domestic work, and forced begging.

“Taking cognizance of the enormity of the issue, ensuring inter-and intra-state coordination in inve-stigation, rescue and rehabilitative mechanism and investing in adequate resources and trained personnel at every level are the need of the hour,” Regional Director (North), CRY, Soha Moitra said.

“A complete apathy is seen among police department. There is no wide-scale research or comprehensive analysis of missing children with an aim to tackle and deal with the problem in Delhi. The national capital has turned out to be most unsafe for children amongst the list of seven major metropolitan cities, according to NCRB 2016 data,” the report stated.

According to the report, Delhi has set-up 11 District Child Protection Units, however, their link with communities through community-based vigilant groups have not been developed yet as mandated in the Centre’s Integrated Child Protection Scheme (ICPS).