• 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.

The figures show a gradual upswing in the number of missing children in several states, led by Maharashtra (yearly average: 13,881), followed by Delhi (6,227) and Madhya Pradesh (4,915).

The average number of children declared “missing” annually in the country was calculated at 44,476 — 122 each day — which included an annual average of 15,407 missing children from the six metropolitan cities. Of this, an average of 11,008 children remained missing. “Where these children are is a serious question to consider,” the study said and pointed out that among metropolitan cities, only Chennai had a good track record for tracing its missing children.

... contd.