Messiah of Missing Children
Happiness delivery: Reuniting lost children with their parents; rescuing abandoned and abused children
It was two years ago that Bihar social department head Raj Kumar first heard about 10-year-old Prakash (name changed). The boy, who spoke only Bangla and suffered from epilepsy, was found stranded at Muzaffarpur railway station by the police in 2015. He had apparently got lost while taking a train all by himself from his home in West Bengal’s Purba Bardhaman to his grandparents’ place in Malda. Social welfare officials shifted Prakash to a state-run children’s home in Saharsa. His daily needs were taken care of there but his future remained uncertain.
Moved by the boy’s plight, Kumar stepped in. His first priority was to address his medical condition. Prakash underwent treatment at government and private hospitals in Muzaffarpur and Patna. Within a year, his seizures came under control. But Kumar, a 2010 batch IAS officer, had a bigger goal. He wanted to see Prakash reunited with his family. His team tried to trace back Prakash’s ill-fated train journey, visited towns and cities in West Bengal and sought the help of officials in Bengal and Jharkhand, but without any headway.
Kumar, then, hit upon the idea of approaching the UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) to see if Prakash’s biometric details would find a match in their database. “Our search threw up a match in Purba Bardhaman district. The team that was sent there made a heartwarming breakthrough. The boy, who had been missing for five years, returned to his family this February,” says Kumar. He has had many such successes. On September 15, Kumar’s team handed over a 14-year-old deaf and mute girl to her family in Araria district. The girl was found lost at
the Araria bus stand on March 3. Social welfare officials sent her to the shelter home in Kishanganj and worked for months to find her parents.
Using the biometric method, the social welfare department has been able to send 70 missing children back to their homes this year. Of them, 17 were girls; four, with special needs, were from Bengal and Jharkhand. “Reuniting children with their parents gives me utmost satisfaction,” beams Kumar.
Kumar’s initiatives go beyond helping lost children. He has arranged professional training in Bengaluru for 14 sexually abused girls, including several rescued from the infamous Muzaffarpur shelter home in 2018. He also convinced the Bihar government to allocate more funds towards food supplies at the child shelters and got cradles placed in government hospitals to dissuade couples from recklessly abandoning their babies in, say, dumpsters or on train tracks.
As a bureaucrat, 43-year-old Kumar does not have roads, buildings and big projects to showcase. He feels immensely content trying to give disadvantaged children a second chance. “I feel blessed because my job has given me the opportunity to make a difference where it matters the most,” he says. ■
Happiness Quest: A joint enterprise of India Today and the RPG Group celebrating exemplary initiatives to spread happiness