Now, track missing children online
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, June 2
Faced with the challenge of tracking nearly 70,000 children who go missing on an average every year, the Government today launched a web portal called “Khoya Paya” to create a social media tool for people to report missing and found children.
Launched by Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, the portal (http://khoyapaya.gov.in) provides for anyone to register and upload details of children found in abandoned or suspicious circumstances and search for missing children with help from 50 attributes provided to base the search.
The portal, Maneka clarified, is not the first and will be in addition to the already existing “TrackChild” portal which the Home Ministry runs through the police. “While the existing portal is a police portal, the new one is a social media portal to engage people in the task of reporting missing and found children,” Prasad said.
The Government justified the need for the new portal saying the old one was official and meant only for police use. “People cannot access the old portal which the police use for communication,” Maneka said.
On an average, around 70,000 children go missing in India every year but the rate of recoveries if very poor. Maneka admitted, “Around 77000 children went missing in 2011, 99000 in 2012 and 65, 000 in 2013. However between 2012 and July 2015, 73, 597 children had been recovered.”
The majority of missing children never get recovered and concerns around their exploitation for organ trade and trafficking always loom.
Although both ministers presented the portal “as an example of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bridging the digital divide example”, it was evident that coordination issues remain to be sorted. For instance, the officers today could not satisfactorily answer questions around how a reported missing child would be eventually tracked.
For instance -- how would the portal help recover a child whom someone sights at a Haridwar ghat considering the child is not going to stay at the ghat nor is the person sighting him going to stay there. “The police would have to act immediately,” Maneka said adding that the portal’s linkages with Childline (1098) and TrackChild will be developed.
