5 kids will go missing the next hour

Nothing captures the apathy to the problem better than the fact that nobody in the Government even knows how large the problem is.

Yes, there are figures with the police — some states don’t even have that — but these, officials themselves admit, barely tell the story.

Consider the following:

• The National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB), the nation’s central crime research organization, tabulates only cases of kidnapped children which it puts at 3196 for the year 2005. Its website posts a list and pictures of 198 cases of missing persons, of which the number of children below 18 is only 66. Given that Nithari alone yielded a figure of at least 30 missing children, this shows how way off the NCRB data is.

• So it’s not a surprise that even Minister of Child and Women Welfare Renuka Chowdhary rubbishes these figures. “My feedback is that the figure of missing children runs into tens of thousands each year. I have asked all state governments to supply figures.” What she doesn’t say is that she gave them two weeks but not one state has replied. What she underlines, however, is the alarm: “I am apprehensive that another Nithari will happen if something is not done urgently.”

• Director of the Central Bureau of Investigation Vijay Shankar says that Nithari, for all its shocking revelations, isn’t much of a surprise. “It’s only a symptom,” says Shankar, who is supervising a team of 60 officers probing the case. “Nithari shows the larger malaise and a failure of the system to respond. There has been a serious failure on every count. Nithari happened because the police failed at the first point of delivery of justice, the administration failed with a just response thereafter and because society as a whole proved to be insensitive.’’

Perhaps, the most reliable estimate of the problem can be gleaned from a 700-page report on trafficking of women and children in India prepared in 2005 by P M Nair, a former CBI officer, who is now with the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and sponsored by NHRC.

As the key investigator for the project, Nair says he did precisely what Chowdhary is trying to do now. All state governments and Union territories, except Bihar, Jharkhand, Punjab and Sikkim, supplied figures of missing children between 1996 and 2001.

... contd.

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