• If she had taken ill before my eyes it would still have been okay. Even if she had died before my eyes it would not have hurt so much. Now, I don’t know what my little daughter is going through. She must be helpless,” says 11-year-old Shilpa Dasarath’s mother, Bharati. On the afternoon of November 5, 2006, Bharati sent Shilpa, the eldest of her three children, to the main road in the lower middle class locality of Udayanagar, on the outskirts of Bangalore, to check out if the local barber shop was open. Shilpa never returned from what should have been a five-minute trip. Her classmate reported that she had seen her walking away with a strange man, while a shopkeeper some distance away claimed to have seen a girl matching her description perched on a camel and crying.

• Bangalore-based autorickshaw driver Suresh and his wife Savita have been searching for their younger son Abhishek since December 10, 2006. The five-year-old child went missing from a locality on the outskirts of Bangalore. With no money to put up even an advertisement, Suresh and his wife have been combing the city streets hoping to find their kid. “I never had the money to buy my son any of the things he liked. I thought I would do it when I have the money. I hope I can at least see him again,” Suresh says.

Between January 1, 2005, and January 30, 2007, 4,568 children below the age of 18 were reported missing in Bangalore city alone. According to the data available with the Missing Persons Bureau (MPB), as many as 1,434 remain untraced to date. The total number of those reported missing in the state between January 2005 and October 2006 was 14,773, with 12,441 remaining untraced (State Crime Records Bureau data).

... contd.