More than 60,000 Children Go Missing In India Each Year

A bench of chief justice Altamas Kabir, justices Vikramajit Sen and J Chelameswar has also directed that all police stations should have a special juvenile police officer to handle the cases of missing children, as reported by Rakesh Bhatnagar for DNA.

It was informed that these officers will be in plain clothes and will coordinate with the child welfare committees regarding the cases. The order was passed by the court on the Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by an NGO ‘Bachpan Bachao Andolan’ which claimed that between January 2008-2010 over 1.7 lakh children have gone missing in the country.  About 60,000 children go missing in India each year, with over 30,000 remaining untraced.

As per the recent report by the statistics ministry, it informs that while an absolute increase of 181 million in the country’s population has been recorded during the decade 2001-2011, it also records a reduction of 5.05 millions in the population of children aged 0-6 years during the same period.

Losing a child is the greatest sorrow felt by parents, it cannot be understood by anyone, let alone the police force. As the missing child isn’t considered as a fiendish crime in the Indian legal system very little attention is paid to the recovery of such children. With the numbers increasing the country is taking the matter seriously, however the need for efficiency and speedy recovery to resolve cases is most asked for in the country.

Also Read: Child Labor: A Tale of Agony and Shame in India