231 missing children reunited with kin by Hry cops this yr
KARNAL: Gurdeep Kaur (name changed) was three years old when she left her home after being thrashed by her stepmother. A toddler at the time, no one knows how she survived for four years before she was rescued by cops at the Ambala railway station in May 2017. With little memory of her past, she had no answers to the cops’ questions about her family. But she did have a vivid memory of her school uniform. She also kept mentioning Barnala.
Based on this information, the anti-human trafficking unit (AHTU) of Haryana police’s crime branch began its uphill task of finding her family.
As she used to frequently mention Barnala in her conversations, the cops took her there to see if she remembers anything. “As we were searching for her house in Barnala, she suddenly recognised her school and we managed to get the address of her grandmother from there,” said sub-inspector Mukesh Rani, in-charge of AHTU, Panchkula, who had been working on the case.
Gurdeep’s is not the sole such case. Every year, hundreds of children go missing from their home and cops at the anti-trafficking unit say that most of these children leave the homes on their own and are often unwilling to go back. In the past one year alone, the anti-human trafficking unit rescued 363 missing children and reunited 231 with their families. The one’s whose families could not be traced were sent back to children’s homes.
The cops deputed in AHTUS did not limit their duty to Haryana only and even traced the families of missing children in Nepal, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Bihar, Punjab, Jharkhand and Maharastra. Talking to Hindustan Times, PK Agrawal, director general of police (crime), Haryana Police, said, “Our teams did a good job in the past year and managed to re-unite over 230 missing children with their families.”
He said that most of the children had been missing for the past two to five years and they did not even remember the names of their parents and localities.
CHILD BEGGING FEARS
However, checking child labour and begging has become a major challenge for the authorities in the state. As per the crime records, the anti-human trafficking units traced 1,941 child baggers and 1,725 child labourers from different cities of the state in the past year.
Out of 1,941, only 127 child beggars were homeless, whereas 1,814 children were handed over their parents. AHTU officials told Hindustan Times that most of the children were forced into begging by their parents.
Of the 1,725 child labourers rescued by the anti-human trafficking unit, 1,567 were working with the consent of their parents and 158 were homeless.
“Poverty is a major issue behind child labour and begging, said the DGP, adding that the police was actively working to end the practice. He added that 41 cases of child labour and begging were registered under the Juvenile Justice Act in 2018.