The Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) Government Railway Police (GRP) has traced 56 missing children in a week and reunited them with their parents. According to officials, the children ran away from their homes because of exam-related stress.
According to police officials, CST receives missing complaints on a daily basis. A special team, which has been given the responsibility of handling such cases, searches platforms for missing children everyday.
In the past six days GRP officials rescued 56 children between 14 to 16 years of age. Officials said 20 per cent of them had run away from home as they were afraid of their exam results, which will be out in May and June.
A 15-year-old girl from Navi Mumbai, Priyakumari Singh, ran away from home on April 7. The GRP police found her the following night.
An official from the missing children squad of the CST GRP said, “The girl was not ready to go home. We found her near a toilet. We found out that she was from a well-to-do family. One of our GRP officials asked her whereabouts, after which she started crying. She was not ready to tell us her name or address. Later, a woman GRP officer took her into confidence after which she narrated her problem.”
The girl said that she appeared for the Class 10 exam. Her father is a dentist and her mother is a government servant. She is the only child. Her parents had high expectations of her but she felt she had not done well in some papers and she couldn’t face them.
GRP officials Sunita Dhokre said, “We called her parents and they said that she always scored more than 90 per cent in every exam. We then counselled the parents as well as the girl and reunited them.”
Officials said there are more than 10 children that were found who had similar reasons for running away.
