NEW DELHI, INDIA – Every new visitor fills Iqbal Khan with a hope that there might be some news of his only son, Irfan. Two years ago, the 9-year-old left home in the morning for school and never returned.
Khan, a resident of Delhi’s Nangloi slum, shows off a photograph of the smiling boy wearing a school uniform. Khan gets talking about how his child was not the mischievous type. He excelled in school and aspired to be a doctor.
Then, holding his forehead, Khan clears his throat and says that he has repeated these lines to dozens of visitors. But help hasn’t arrived yet.
His wife, Roshan Khan, returns from fetching the day’s water, thrusting two full buckets down onto the floor. She then bursts into tears and pleads for help in finding their son.
She joins her husband on a run-down cot, the only piece of furniture in their tiny, dilapidated dwelling. The slum where they live is home to many migrants who earn a living as daily-wage laborers.
“When we moved to this area, the first thing we did was to get our son enrolled in a school,” Iqbal Khan says. “He had made friends there and was happy. And then, he vanished in the thin air.”
He says his son was abducted somewhere along the way to school.
“That fateful day, he didn’t even reach his school,” he says.
And the Khan family is not the only one in the country waiting for lost children to come home.
Families of missing children and children’s rights activists say that the majority of disappearances are of children from poor families. They also say that authorities are apathetic toward helping these families, prioritizing the cases of families of higher socio-economic statuses. Authorities say that coordination between parents and police must improve to achieve more accurate records, though the police’s information-sharing network regarding missing children has drawn criticism from the High Court of Delhi. Meanwhile, children’s rights activists recommend increased collaboration and use of technology in order to trace missing children.
Nearly 11 children go missing every hour in India, says Bhuwan Ribhu, national secretary of Bachpan Bachao Andolan, or Save the Children Movement, a local children’s rights organization. About two-thirds are traced, while one-third are not, according to a recent study by the organization.
A missing child might have been kidnapped for various reasons such as ransom, begging, slavery, illicit intercourse and marriage, according to the Indian Penal Code. Children and families from socially and economically poorer backgrounds form the majority of those abducted, according to the report by Bachpan Bachao Andolan.
Delhi has the highest number of missing children and untraced children of any metropolitan city in India, according to the report. Some attribute this to the large migratory population living in the slums here, as children are seen as easy targets.
Kunwarpar Singh, a daily-wage laborer, says his son, Ravi, went missing in 2010. Ravi, 12 at the time, had gone out to play but never returned home.
Singh says that the only reason he feels helpless in finding Ravi is because he’s poor.
“Who would listen to a penniless laborer?” he asks. “If my poverty wasn’t enough, the loss of the youngest son made life miserable for me.”
He says that the disappearance of Ravi has destroyed his family.
“My wife died waiting for her son, and my other two children live more like orphans,” says Singh, who spends most of his time searching for Ravi. “With the loss of my child, I lost my entire family.”
Singh narrates how he informed the police about the ransom call he received the day after his son disappeared.
“But they did [not make] any concrete efforts to find my son,” he says.
Every day, Singh leaves his shanty in Delhi’s Mangolpuri slum, boards his bicycle and searches for Ravi in different parts of the city.
“I am not able to concentrate on my work, and people think I have gone mad,” he says. “But I am sure that my son is alive and needs my help. I can’t just wait and watch.”
Dina Nath Chauhan, a Delhi-based children’s rights activist, says that the biggest problem is the apathy of law enforcement agencies. He says that authorities don’t acknowledge the majority of children who go missing, let alone register the cases and investigate them.
“I have followed up the cases of Iqbal, Kunwarpal and others personally and know how they have gone from pillar to post, but without any outcome,” Chauhan says.
He says that socio-economic status dictates the effort that authorities exert to locate missing children.
“Police doesn’t take the cases of the poor seriously, and the criminals are aware of this,” he says. “If the unfortunate thing happens with the kid of rich, the story would be entirely different.”
The government needs to take cases of missing children more seriously, Chauhan says. Law enforcement agencies assume little accountability, passing the buck among local governments, union territory and state governments and the federal government.
Kailash Satyarthi, founder of Bachpan Bachao Andolan, says that it’s high time that India exerts power not only as a market-driven nation, but also as a nation committed to social consciousness.
“Corruption can be one of the biggest issues harming the nation and its economy,” Satyarthi says, referencing the focus on corruption here these days. “But at the same time, the millions of children who are being forced to work, kidnapped, abducted, trafficked in the name of a better life and go missing after having been separated from their parents need to be acknowledged and accepted.”
But authorities here say the problem is not as bad as some make it seem.
The real number of missing children cases are lower in reality than on file, says Rajan Bhagat, spokesman of Delhi Police.
“Whenever a complaint is made by the parents about a missing child, it is updated on all records,” he says. “But often, the child returns on his own, and parents don’t deem it necessary to inform the police.”
He says that the police have established the Zonal Integrated Police Network, an online network that enables police from various forces to share information regarding missing children.
But the High Court of Delhi called the police’s website “useless” and “obsolete” earlier this year, mentioning specifically the difficulty of accessing information on the Zonal Integrated Police Network.
Thomas Chandy, chief executive officer of Save the Children India, an international nongovernmental organization, says that the government and nongovernmental organizations must collaborate to implement an integrated child protection program in order to better safeguard children’s rights.
He also recommends increased use of technology, such as the Internet, to report missing children and to seek support from the community on child protection. He also suggests that police should enact a special high alert on railway stations during calamities such as floods and famines, when large numbers of people vacate the area and children are particularly vulnerable.
Chandy says that authorities can’t turn a blind eye toward the issues of urban poverty, migration and street kids – conditions that lead to high numbers of children going missing.
“We have to look at the issue on war footing,” he says.