4 states told to trace 12k missing kids
On: 14th November 2014 , Posted By: Dhananjay Mahapatra, Source: The Times of India
SC Gives Bihar, Assam, C'garh, MP 4 Weeks To Find Children Missing Since '11
Police slept over complaints about thousands of children, majority of them girls, missing every year from impoverished belts of Bihar, Assam, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. But now the police in these states will have to work 24x7 as the Supreme Court on Thursday gave them just four weeks to trace 12,591 children missing since 2011.
That the police and state administration can act when the court wields the stick was proven by Bihar, whose chief secretary and DGP were summoned during the last hearing for not registering FIRs on complaints of parents about their missing children and lack of effort to trace them. Bihar's counsel told the court, possibly to get a pat on the back, that in just a week's time, the police had traced 169 of the 633 missing children. He said children mostly went missing from areas where social imbalance and divide between rich and poor was acute. The state government was tackling the issues through social and economic policies aimed to bridge the gap, the counsel said. The court, which has been trying to bring a sense of urgency among states, made a string of stinging observations. ''If you could trace 169 children in a week, why did you not take steps like this before? Why did you have to wait for the court's intervention,'' asked a bench of Chief Justice H L Dattu and Justices Madan B Lokur and A K Sikri.
This means the petitioner NGO `Bachpan Bachao Ando lan' was correct in accusing the police of being lethargic and unconcerned about the parents' complaints of missing children, the bench said.
''What all will the court monitor missing children, human trafficking, drug abuse? If the Supreme Court has to monitor the work of administration and police through continuous mandamus, then we must have another Supreme Court to deal with such continuous mandamus matters,'' it said.
If Bihar Police have a relatively achievable target of tracing 464 missing children by December 4, the target for Madhya Pradesh, Assam and Chhattisgarh was gigantic, given their lethargic track record and the deadline of December 11 fixed for them by the SC.
Madhya Pradesh saw 23,000 children going missing since 2011 and it has not been able to trace 8,000 of them till date. The SC asked its chief secretary to remain present in court on November 20. The court gave both Assam and Chhattisgarh four weeks to trace 2,800 and 1,327 missing children respectively .
Gujarat and Odisha, which have waved the `good governance' flag for years, have shown the same lethargy when it comes to missing children. Odisha in three years reported 8,428 children missing of which it traced 3,768 leaving 4,660 untraced during 201113. During the same period, Gujarat saw 3,500 of missing children remain untraced. But none of the states addressed the issue where do these thousands of children, majority of which are girls, go?
Follow