Pushpa Devi lives in Laxmi Nagar, not more than a 30-minute drive from Nithari. Like millions across the country, she, too, would have watched the details unfold — of missing children, their suspected remains, bone fragments and the rage of their helpless parents. For her, however, the story had an all-too familiar ring.

Not only because her daughter Poonam Lal went missing for 10 years — she has since been traced — but it was her case that, five years ago, prompted the Supreme Court to issue a detailed list of do-s and don’ts on missing children. It’s a 12-point list that, for all practical purposes, gathers dust as police forces, across states, plead helplessness when asked the question: Where have the children gone?

In fact, missing children is the veritable black hole in law-enforcement. As an investigative series from several states will show, just like Nithari, where police failed to even acknowledge the problem, elsewhere, too, the typical police response is: the missing child is the parents’ problem, not ours.

And if Nithari shows that a missing child may end up buried in a neighbour’s backyard, the investigation shows that they can, as easily, end up in several places: as cheap labour in roadside shops, prostitutes in a brothel, exploited in the child-porn industry, kidnapped by the beggar mafia or even trafficked abroad.

Says Justice A S Anand, former chief of the National Human Rights Commission who, in 2005, sponsored the most definitive study yet of trafficking in women and children in India: “Where are all these missing children? They have obviously not vanished into thin air. Children are our assets and we only do lip service to the problem of missing children. Even when a report of a missing child is lodged with the police, it is treated as a minor issue. Everyone thinks the child will show up and if that does not happen, the case is forgotten and closed.”

... contd.