Sold into slavery
India’s missing children
NEW DELHI, April 13, (Agencies): It was a balmy August afternoon last year when 11-year-old Piyush Sharma disappeared while playing outside his home in the small east Indian town of Hatia.
The skinny little boy, with big brown eyes and an infectious smile, had just returned from school and told his mother he wanted to play outside before lunch.
When she called for him 15 minutes later he was gone.
“It’s been nine months since I saw him. He was still wearing his school uniform — a pink shirt and blue shorts. Someone must have taken him. He always played nearby,” said Pinki Sharma, 35, Piyush’s mother, by phone from Hatia in Jharkhand state.
“My husband has travelled to many places looking for him, but no one knows anything. But I will look for him until I die.”
Piyush is one of about 250,000 children registered as missing on the government’s Track Child portal between January 2012 to March 2017 - that’s five children vanishing every hour.
But campaigners say these figures are just the tip of the iceberg, as many cases are not registered by parents or the police, and the children dismissed as runaways.
Most, however, are sold into slavery in a country where poverty prevails and child labour is normalised, despite being banned.
The Track Child data also shows nearly 73,000 children — 30 percent — are still missing despite a raft of initiatives to better protect and find these children.
A lack of training of police, child welfare and protection officials, poor coordination between agencies in different states, coupled with massive public apathy is hampering the battle to locate India’s “lost generation”, say campaigners.
Missing children are so common in India that notices printed in classified sections of India’s daily newspapers are buried alongside tender notices and job vacancies, with blurred black and white photos alongside a description and a contact number.
Pintu, 10, last seen at a Delhi railway station wearing a red sweater and black trousers. Shiwani, 16, who vanished outside her home in southern Delhi, dressed in blue jeans. Pooja, 13, in white salwar kameez, last seen in a Delhi market.
Each notice ends in the same way: Sincere efforts have been made by local police to trace out this missing girl/boy, but no clue has come to light so far.
An Afghan official confirmed that at least five people were killed when a suicide bomber on foot carried out an attack in the capital, Kabul.
Najib Danish, deputy spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said three others were wounded in Wednesday’s blast in central Kabul.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s attack via the IS-run Amaq news agency.
The attack took place near the country’s Defense Ministry compound, as well as a city police station.
Bangladesh border guards opened fire Thursday at a boat ferrying Rohingya migrants from neighbouring Myanmar, killing one woman and leaving four others injured, police said.
The border authorities came under fire just after midnight and shot back at two fishing trawlers along a river dividing Bangladesh from Myanmar’s westernmost state of Rakhine, police said.
“The BGB (Border Guard Bangladesh) later found the boat anchored at a river island. One woman was found shot dead and four were injured,” Mainuddin Khan, the police chief in the Bangladeshi border town of Teknaf, told AFP.