Over the past five years, Sandeshkhali in South 24 Parganas has reported hundreds of missing boys and girls. With an inactive administration responding inadequately to the problem, the numbers only keep rising. Most affected families have not registered cases, as they feel the police will not be of much help. Many bank on the hope that their children will return someday and it’s better not to involve the police.

Shankar Sardar of Baro Asgara village hasn’t heard from his 14-year-old son Sambhu for the past 16 months. When his neighbour Kamala Kanta offered Sambhu a job at a monthly salary of Rs 1,500, he could hardly resist. With one less mouth to feed plus the additional income, the deal wasn’t bad for Shankar either.

But not a penny has reached Shankar till now. Neither does he know the whereabouts of his son. An agricultural labourer, Shankar neither had the courage nor the resources to visit the police station—15 km away with a couple of rivers to cross—to lodge a complaint. “Whenever I ask about my son, Kamala Kanta replies that he has escaped from the address where he was employed and is now untraceable,” says Shankar about his neighbour, who is now somewhere in UP’s Faizabad.

Every other household in the village has a similar tale to narrate. About 2 km from Shankar’s village is Bhatidaha, where Taccho Sheikh’s 16-year-old daughter Jabeda Khatun has been missing for over two years now. “Jabeda was fair and looked like a memsahib,” says the father. She was working in a brick-kiln till one fine morning two local youths told Taccho that she had been married off to a good family in Haryana. When Taccho and his wife Sabita Bibi insisted on Jabeda’s new address, the youths just said: “Good family, good house”. More pressure yielded a piece of paper with directions on how to reach her in-laws: “Husband: Ishak Sheikh, Witness: Nasiruddin Jakir. Get down at New Delhi, board bus No 77 to New Bazar and get an auto from there to Kaligaon at Rs 5.”

... contd.