West Bengal shows the way in tracking missing children

New Delhi, August 5 : After Nithari, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) recommended a national database to help track down missing children, and West Bengal is already working towards this end.

The state is setting up a missing children tracking system, an initiative of the Women and Child Welfare Ministry, with the help of the National Informatics Centre (NIC). The system, complete with the database, will have tools like phonetic search and links to NGOs apart from being children-friendly.

The police, juvenile justice homes, NGOs and even the public will have access to the database. The public will have restricted access to the site and option to upload information about missing or found children. The information will be verified by the police before being compiled as data.

The project, supported by the Unicef, is already three months into implementation in West Bengal. The state already has a website with information on missing persons since 2004. All 411 police stations of the state are computerised and linked to the site and it is mandatory to upload data on missing and traced/ found people in the state. Last month, the juvenile homes and NGOs were given access who are in the process of uploading their data on missing children. In the next phase, it will be opened to the public.

Director of Social Welfare Department in West Bengal K P Sinha said, “There is great potential in this site and it will definitely help us trace children more systematically and effectively. It is still in a preparatory stage. By the year end, we should be fully operational.”

“Untill now, none of the existing sites on missing children across the country have any standardised tracking system in place,” said an NIC official.

The plan is to ensure that all daily diary entries on missing children are uploaded on the site for 100 per cent reporting of cases. This will also help officials to act fast on the cases. The parametre of how photographs of missing children would appear on the site are still being discussed.

The data will be made available in three languages — English, Bengali and Hindi. NIC engineers have also been given counselling sessions to acquaint themselves with children-specific problems and issues, including the non-precise information given by them.

NIC, West Bengal, Director Subir Roy said, “Once the West Bengal project is fully operational, we will extend it to four other states — Karnataka, Maharashtra, Delhi and Andhra Pradesh. Sinha added...

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