It wasn’t Nithari but an Allahabad High Court directive on the call of a harried father searching for his 14-year-old son for the last two years that forced the Uttar Pradesh government to ask all police stations to constitute special missing children cells and compile figures.

It was finally on February 6, thanks to the court orders, that the government completed compilation of the figures of missing children for UP for the year 2006 and submitted to the court. As many as 3,649 children went missing in the State last year, 3016 of whom were between the age of 10 years and 18 years. (See Box).

All this has been known because of one man’s search. Vishnu Dayal Sharma, a retired postal department employee living in Agra’s Mohan Girara village, has been looking for his son Krishna Gopal since February 22, 2005, when he left for his maternal uncle Banwari Lal’s place in Jagdishpura, 4 km away from where he went to school, never to return.

Between the day he lodged a police report on February 24, 2005, and the day the High Court asked the police to act on January 3, 2007, Sharma had done the entire ladder from the local police station to the IGP but to no avail. “I felt they were not interested in tracing my son and so I moved the court,” he said.

While Jagdishpura police did start work on the court’s order, it only surprised Sharma further. The police called him and told him that Krishna’s uncle Banwari Lal had been detained because his was the last destination the boy had gone to. Sharma said, “I have no reason to suspect Banwari. The police just want to dispose of the case somehow.”

... contd.