A computer in a nondescript room on the fifth floor of a commercial complex in Indore is an unlikely source of hope for anyone, leave aside distraught parents agonising over their missing children.

But it’s the fountainhead of an idea that can go a long way in searching for children, whose parents often chase false leads, dream of miracles, and return disappointed to their empty lives.

Seven years ago, when an NGO, National Centre for Missing Children, launched a website missingindiankids.com, they sought details of missing children from parents and police stations and posted them on the site with photographs.

Even today, the government, despite its vast resources, does not have anything of the sort that Anuj Bhargava, a portal developer, and his wife Nidhi conceived when they stumbled upon an advertisement, “Have you seen me”, of a missing American boy on the Internet.

“I searched the Net for information on missing kids in vain. Even National Crime Bureau of Records did not have any records,” says Anuj, 44, a process engineer. Together with his wife Nidhi, an MBA, he began the free service to help parents “who die everyday when their children disappear.”

Within the first couple of months, the website started getting on an average 4,000 visitors daily from Alabama to California and from Kerala to Kolkata. In the first week of this month, the website registered more than 97,000 hits. The website now has details of over 400 missing children from all over India.

... contd.