dna edit: Children of a lesser god

The apex court set a four-week deadline on Thursday for these states to find 12,591 children who have been missing since 2011. On the same day it asked the Centre’s opinion on the standard operating procedures that the National Legal Service Authority had drawn up for registering FIRs on missing kids and the line of action to be adopted to trace them. Thanks to the sustained efforts by the Bachpan Bachao Andolan, an NGO, which filed a PIL, there seems to be some hope for these children and many more like them, who are forced to work at affluent homes and hazardous industries, beg on the streets for syndicates and be part of the sex trade. Most of them come from households which are too poor to bring up their children.

This is not to imply that their parents trade them for money, though instances of buying and selling children for a paltry Rs5,000 are far more frequent than what come to light. While poverty is an important factor, it is the lack of resolve of the police and state administrations to bust organised child-trafficking rackets that is at the heart of the gargantuan problem. Sometimes it takes just a rap from the courts to jolt the police into action. In its bid to impress the SC, the Bihar administration traced 163 children in a week — a move that backfired, inviting stringent criticism from the court about the police’s lax attitude all this while.

This is a case of history repeating itself at alarming frequency. Last year, an apex court bench was angry at the way the government was handling the matter of 1.7 lakh missing children — in a slipshod manner that has unfortunately become its characteristic response. This year the number has risen to 3.2 lakh with an addition of 1.5 lakh missing children. Normally, 45 per cent of the annual figure is seldom traced. The NCRB records show that once in every eight minutes a child goes missing. More shockingly, 55 per cent of these kids are girls — testifying to our biased approach against the girl child.

When it comes to missing children India fares much worse than China and even Pakistan. The states with the worst track records are Maharashtra, West Bengal, Delhi and Karnataka. Maharashtra has the dubious distinction of registering the highest number of cases of missing kids, while Bengal tops the list of untraced children. In Mumbai alone 500 children go missing every year. Sadly, it is only now that police commissioner Rakesh Maria has launched a three-month drive with teams dedicated to search operations and cracking down on gangs engaged in kidnapping and running begging rackets.

It is amply clear that the existing framework is least equipped to address a crisis of this magnitude and that neither the UPA government nor the current NDA regime has accorded the cases of missing children the urgency they deserve. Had it not been for the courts and a few dedicated NGOs, thousands of these children, who would have otherwise been swallowed into the ominous world of crime and prostitution, have got a lifeline. It is the courts and the NGOs’ spirited fight against an institutional cruelty that has kept the issue alive in collective consciousness.