Childhood and innocenceThe figures are astounding. Some 6,500 children, mostly girls, go missing in Andhra Pradesh every year.
Of these, 2,500 are reported missing in the twin cities. In 2010, Hyderabad, reported 364 boys and 532 girls missing, and Cyberabad also reported 364 boys and 532 girls missing, according to the State Crime Records Bureau.
Out of the 896 cases of missing children in Hyderabad and Cyberabad, each. Around 241 children are untraced in Hyderabad and Cyberabad has 385 untraced children.
The causes of children going missing are many. Some run away from home afraid that their poor performance in examinations will invite punishment from their parents, others leave home because of harsh treatment from parents or step parents or because they are physically or sexually abused.
Trafficking in children, selling them into the sex trade, organised begging rackets are other reasons for the large number of officially registered missing children and who knows how many unreported cases.
Several children are never traced.
Parents blame the police for sitting on the cases. Police counter that parents don’t lodge a missing complaint quickly enough.
“They initially search for their missing child and then approach us on the following day or so. By the time we swing into action, the child could fall into the hands of a trafficker or flees somewhere in case of a child who has escaped from his home,” said a senior police official. It’s a peculiar excuse, given that parents cannot obviously rush to a police station the minute a child cannot be found.
In the city, the most number of missing children are registered in the South Zone — 200 missing cases a year and most of them are untraced. Five babies were kidnapped from state-run hospitals and private hospitals in the last year.
Parents have to visit police stations several times to get the police to take action on missing persons complaints, a fact that one police inspector acknowledges.
“Parents, even though they stay very far away from the city keep visiting the police station to know the status of the case. Their anxiety and curiosity keeps us on our toes and we are trying our best to unite them with their children,”said the Nampally police inspector, Ch Sridhar.
What is alarming is that the number of missing girl children has gone up drastically in the last five years. Poor families often abandon their girl child at a railway station or bus stand. They fall into the traps of prostitution and begging racketeers.
From April till June, several missing children complaints are reported across the state because this is the time when exam results come out and some students with poor grades run away from home to escape their parents wrath. However, in most such cases they return home in a day or two, said an official of the Directorate of Women’s Development.
A proposal made nine years ago by the Crime Investigation Department, to start a missing cases cell, has gone nowhere despite the tragic nature of the crime and the large number of cases, especially of children. Crimes against children have low priority in our country, when in fact they should be accorded the highest priority.
-Agencies