New Delhi has the second-highest official abduction rate in India after Kolkata. The Nav Shristi (New Birth) organization helps parents in the Neb Sarai area of the city whose children have disappeared. It has a long list of children on its books, some missing for years. It produces plastic-wrapped cards for them to show to people; a photograph, the child’s name and the date reported missing. Its files contain reports on each case, sad little typed form letters with the name of the missing child inked in and a picture pinned to one corner of the sheet.
“I am the father/mother/guardian of Sanjay missing since 02/06/05,” one reads. “I did my best to locate him/her but failed. I have tried to lodge my complaint in Sangam Vihar police station but deliberately the officer in charge of said police station declined to entertain my complaint.”
Vikas was 10 when he vanished seven years ago. His black and white picture shows a small boy with big eyes. One of a family of three boys and two girls, he had been doing well at school, especially mathematics, but classes had broken up for the summer.
His mother, Kamini, remembered him running off with his friends to play. She hasn’t seen him since.
“He went to the playground with his friends at about 6am, but he did not come back. His friends said he was playing with them and then they noticed he was not there. They began searching for him but couldn’t find him. He must have been abducted,” she said.
The police took their report and said they would call if they heard anything, but seven years later, the call has never come.
“My friends said he would be fine and that one day he would come home, but he has not. For the first three or four years I spent every penny on searching for him. I searched the whole of Delhi. Once a year I go to my home in Bihar to look for him and whenever a lead comes up, I go,” she said.
Anuradha Maharishi, from the child charity Bal Raksha (formerly a branch of Save the Children) said children from the poorest areas were the most common targets.
“Sometimes they are lured with food or told they will have a better life and they come voluntarily,” she said. “Children say they have been given a sedative injection and they wake up and find they are in a railway station and if they make a sound they are burned with cigarettes.”
She said changes to the adoption laws had made it likely that more children would go abroad.
“There is a business of taking children and putting them up for adoption,” she said. “It is a big, big issue. What people think of as legitimate adoption agencies are actually stealing them and selling these children to desperate parents.”
But for parents of the children who are taken, it is often too late.
“It is true: Missing is worse than death,” Anuj Bhargava said. “If a child dies, the parents know they are gone, but if they are missing, they die every day.”
RSS