Uttarakhand govt reunites over 200 missing people with their families

Fourteen years after she went missing from a mental asylum in Assam, Subhadra Patir was found wandering in Uttarahand’s Tehri and and lodged in a women’s shelter here in 2015. Life came full circle when the 50-year-old was finally reunited with her son this month.

Over 200 people, most of them women and children, who were missing or languishing in asylums and other institutions, have been reunited with their families over the last year by the Uttarakhand government.

Additional Secretary of the Social Welfare department, Manoj Chandran, said 232 such people living in women’s shelter homes, asylums and orphanages have got back to their families.

Of them, 38 were lodged in asylums, but most had recovered from their mental illness. They also expressed a desire to meet their families again, Chandran said.

However, what was saddening was that several of their relatives living in the state did not appear too keen on taking them back, the official said.

Such families took their relatives home only after the state government warned them that a share of their property would be seized and alloted to the estranged relatives.

Patir’s story is happier. After officials finally managed to track down her family after a painstaking search, her son, Durlabh Patir, rushed all the way from Assam to Dehradun to take his mother home.