Above: A protest in Delhi over missing children. The police must take prompt action on complaints/Photo: Anil Shakya 

In a positive step, the Delhi High Court has directed the police to allow FIRs to be registered through SMS, e-mail or WhatsApp for those who have disappeared

By Rajbir Deswal

Every single month we have 150 reports of children who go missing. That’s a crisis because we are only 2.7 million people,” laments Jamaican Child Rights activist Betty Ann Blaine. She founded the “Hear the Children Cry Movement” and swore to work with the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. Yet, in India are we concerned about our missing children? On an average, 174 children go missing every day and half of them remain untraced. The National Crime Records Bureau report says more than one lakh children were reported missing till 2016, and 55,625 of them remained untraced till the end of the year.

Betty’s counterpart in India, Nobel Peace Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi and his Bachpan Bachao Andolan have done much for India’s missing children. In 2012, in Bachpan Bachao Andolan versus Union of India, the Supreme Court said that if a person below 18 is reported missing, the police has to file a kidnapping offence immediately and relay the information and photograph of the child to all police units within their jurisdiction. Accordingly, an advisory was issued by the home ministry to all states and Union Territories to register FIRs in all cases of missing persons and put in place standard operating procedures to trace out missing children. In one go, 75,808 cases were ordered to be registered all over the country.

In 2015, “Operation Muskan” was launched to trace missing children. States were directed to create children’s homes and shelters. This was quite similar to “Child Focus” of Belgium and “The Smile of the Child” in Greece.

However, the fact is that the situation on the ground leaves much to be desired as far as proper implementation of the Court directive is concerned. In a recent case, a woman alleged inaction and delay by the police in lodging an FIR on a missing person report. Her husband went missing in August 2018 and an FIR was registered after four and half months. The Delhi High Court was constrained to order the Delhi Police to immediately register cases when such information was received through SMS, WhatsApp, emails and other means. While this will result in an increase in the number of abduction, kidnapping and other related crime cases, it will save valuable time.

In fact, in 2012, the Punjab and Haryana High Court had done away with the practice of just recording a “missing report” in the daily diary registers of police stations as there was no serious investigation that followed into the disappearance of persons. The Court ordered registration of cases in Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh while deciding PILs filed by various NGOs, the Human Rights Protection Council, etc. The Court had specifically referred to a judgment in 2002 of the Supreme Court in Hori Lal vs Commissioner of Police, New Delhi, where comprehensive guidelines were given for investigating officers in the above mentioned case.

Compare this scenario elsewhere in the world. In Scotland and Lancashire Constabulary, information on missing persons is taken very seriously and a regimen is followed in uploading their photos, searching for them through missing persons’ coordinators, finding their age, health and social media details. They have put in place a “Child Rescue Alert”. “Purple Alerts” are issued in cases where the victim is suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia.

In America, eight million people go missing on an average every year. In the UK, the number touches 2,50,000; Canada, 60,000 and Australia, 38,000.  Interpol also issues a “Yellow Notice” for tracing missing people through its International Missing Persons Database. The US Department of Justice has a “clearing house” in its National Missing and Unidentified Persons System to find victims of disappearance. Other groups in Scotland working in identifying and tracing missing persons include “Breathing Space”, “The Samaritans”, “Barnardos” and “Children 1st”.

At most of the places, there is a common belief that unless 24 hours have passed a person is not considered missing. But latest court orders have clarified that it is no longer so and valuable time in finding the missing person should not be lost. Hence, registration of FIRs on SMS, WhatsApp, emails, etc, has been put in place with immediate effect. In the case of those not found for seven years, genuine efforts should be made to trace them before declaring them dead for purposes of property, shares and other issues. This period of seven years can be discounted in case of wars, genocides and disasters.

Efforts to trace missing persons, especially girls, are over concerns that they may have fallen into the hands of human traffickers, mafias, vested interests and kidnappers. But what if a person has gone missing of his own volition? There is still a need for a law in such cases as he could have got involved in an accident, become a victim of a crime or has become incapacitated and unstable.

There can be many reasons for a person going missing—opting for a life of obscurity, having suicidal tendencies, being abused, becoming part of a cult and so on. The police will dither while processing a missing report into an FIR as often, the missing person is found or returns home within a few hours. In such cases, the efforts of the police go waste. They don’t realise that as they dilly dally, the missing person may have been kidnapped or trafficked. Loss of time also means that valuable evidence will get lost and the victim could be subjected to violence or killed.

The advisory by the home ministry clearly states that in case a missing child is not recovered within four months from the date of filing of the FIR, the matter may be forwarded to the Anti-Human Trafficking Unit in each state in order to enable it to take up more intensive investigation regarding the child.

Advocate Amit Chaudhary (Fatehabad) of Punjab and Haryana High Court lays stress on employing technology to detect missing persons. “It should also be made mandatory and incumbent on the part of guardians and keepers of people likely to go missing—those vulnerable for reasons of health, ailment or any other cogent reason—that they take adequate precautions while taking care of them.” He added: “The guardians of such vulnerable persons should have a navigation chip put in the clothes, shoes, bracelets, rings or any appropriate en­semble of the person.”

That would save them and others a lot of trouble and worry.

—The writer is a retired IPS officer of Haryana and a practicing advocate