Magnificent seven rewrite all rules... to unite 54 missing children with their families

NEW DELHI: At an age when usually people lose ambition, 60-year-old Ashok Kumar, an ASI with Delhi Police nearing retirement sits tirelessly staring the Zipnet on computer for hours. His ambition: To unite lost children with their parents defying the geographical and administrative boundaries. Together, Ashok and his six colleagues posted in Anti-human Trafficking Unit of West Delhi have traced 54 missing or kidnapped children and with painstaking effort united them with their parents across the country within one year.

In a unique probe methodology, the cops breaking traditional approach of finding the child first, visited the observation homes for children and focussed on finding the parents of the children registered there with whatever clue they could harbour.

“Our team interacted with the recovered children at length and noted minute details to ascertain the circumstances under which the kids went missing or were kidnapped. It has come out that some of the children got misplaced while they were travelling from other states to Delhi with their parents and in some cases, the children were kidnapped.” said DCP West Vijay Kumar.

After carefully noting all details the team which comprised of Inspector Vijay pal, SI Ashok Kumar, SI Omvir, ASI Phool Singh, ASI Sheo Ram, ASI Sube Singh and constable Vikram of Anti Human Trafficking unit spent hours on computer to match details on ZIPNET as well as track themissingchild.gov.in. to get some lead.

It is worth mentioning here that in some of the cases, the restored children were found missing or kidnapped since more than 10 to 12 years. “It was difficult as some of the parents who were mostly labourers had shifted their houses, so we had to track their addresses after visiting 10 to 15 places in and outside Delhi but the joy on their faces after the reunion eased our pain,” grins SI Ashok Kumar.

One of the boys, Chinto, who went missing in 2006 from Adarsh Nagar was found in Lajpat Nagar home in 2017. Chintu now 17 and pursuing a technical course through ITI. The parents too have expressed gratitude for the police officers.