75,000 Missing Children Remain Untraced: Govt

New Delhi: Around 75,000 children who had gone missing in the last three years are yet to be traced,  the Rajya Sabha was informed.

Of the about 2.36 lakh children who went missing in the last three years, 1,61,800 have been traced, minister of state for Parliamentary affairs Paban Singh Ghatowar said during the Question Hour.

"Unfortunately about 75,000 are still untraced," he said.

The Centre, he said, has issued advisories to states to appoint nodal officers at all police stations to deal with such cases and make registration of FIRs mandatory. The advisories followed two interim orders of the Supreme Court in January 2013, he said.

The Supreme Court had ordered mandatory recording of FIRs with regard to missing children and the formation of special juvenile police units in different states.

Ghatowar, who was replying on behalf of women and child development minister Krishna Tirath, admitted that the issue of missing children has assumed an "alarming" proportion.

He informed the House that the pilot of a web portal TrackChild has been launched to deal with the issue.

States are also being asked to update data on missing children on the portal, he added.

The minister further said the problem of children going missing was aggravated by economic and social factors and also by criminal activities.

He, however, said there was no information that missing children were being sold to neighbouring countries.

When asked about children being kidnapped from hospitals, he said there have been such cases but that law and order is a subject under the jurisdiction of the states.

As per data with the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 34,406 children remained untraced in 2011, 23,236 in 2010 and 18,166 in the year before that.

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