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Saroo is one of the many lost children in India. Think about the challenges that children like him experience.

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A brief description about main reasons why children get lost everyday in India. 

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A brief description about main reasons why children get lost everyday in India. 

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Article about children getting lost in India

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Article about children getting lost in India

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This article is about children getting lost at Sealdah station and many woman who are scared to leave their child alone to hold a thought of constant worry if someone will take their child or infant. This article has drawn my attention of how horrible the situation has gotten every year.  It includes much more than getting lost such as poverty, less amount of freedom and education etc.

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When they awoke, their child had gone. As the parents slept near platform 14a, someone had carefully bent down between them and taken their three-year-old daughter. Astonished, they demanded to review the CCTV images but found there was no footage. No witnesses came forward. On 15 June, between 3am and 5am, another child had vanished into thin air from Kolkata's Sealdah rail station.

The precise number of minors who go missing from Sealdah's 20 platforms is not known. The only ones documented are those fortunate enough to be rescued. Between June 2016 and last May, 1,628 vulnerable children, most of them travelling alone, were retrieved - the highest number ever found at a single train station in India. Of these, 134 were girls and the youngest was four years old. Hundreds more were apprehended by police, entirely for their own safety.

They were among the thousands of children who arrive at the station alone each year - many of them fleeing poverty or abuse at home, some despatched by desperate families unable to provide for them, or hoping they will secure some kind of work that will provide money - work for which they are legally too young and which can be highly dangerous. They may live for months in the station, then suddenly disappear, their fate unknown to their families and the Indian authorities.

Officials at Kolkata's Child in Need Institute ( Cini) describe a narrow window of time during which they must reach the child, befuddled amid the pandemonium of one of India's busiest stations, before the traffickers do.

Compounding the challenge is the speed with which minors are swallowed by the vast crowds. Children can go missing in plain sight. About 750 trains reach Sealdah each day with almost two million people passing through the station, seven times more than Britain's busiest station, London Waterloo, and nearly 30 times greater than Manchester Piccadilly. "We have to move extremely quickly," said Cini's Babu Dey, who has spent more than 20 years rescuing vulnerable children at Sealdah.

It has been a politically sensitive issue for years, so what is astonishing is that the number of children disappearing from India's immense railway network shows little sign of receding. What happens to those who vanish is unclear. Many are trafficked into the sex trade, others are forced into child labour across the city.

Many homeless families live on Sealdah station from where hundreds of children go missing every year. Photograph: Piyal Adhikary/EPA

A random visit by the Observer during a normal working day - Tuesday 18 July - confirmed the scale of the crisis. At Sealdah's child help desk, a logbook contained details of the latest children to have been rescued. At 11.25 the previous night a six-year-old girl had been found wandering the northern platforms and brought in. Twelve hours later a 14-year-old boy was rescued, alone and confused. At 1.30pm a 12-year-old boy had been retrieved from platform four and now sat solemnly at the desk waiting to be taken home.

Around the corner at the offices of the railway police, inspector Monirujaman Molla revealed he had found a further five children that day. It was 2.17pm. Molla picked up a heavy binder and began thumbing through the names of 346 children found so far this year. In 2016 his team identified 529, the first year such records were kept. "They keep on coming, all the time," he shrugged, nodding towards a small cubicle.

Inside sat two boys, aged 10 and 13, from the south side of the city, who had just been plucked from platform 12. The children explained they had travelled to Sealdah to "roam" - a rite of passage for many Bengali youngsters who equate the station with adventure and discovery. "Unfortunately some never make it home," said Dey. Others, he added, travelled up to 40km to use "railwire," Sealdah's free wifi, only to vanish forever.

Meanwhile, reports were coming in of other children going missing. Less than a kilometre from Sealdah, on the third floor of Cini's central office, the staff of Kolkata's 24-hour toll-free Childline were jotting down details of the latest to have vanished. Among them was a four-year-old boy who vanished two days ago. A deaf five-year-old girl had disappeared the previous evening. A further two minors had just been reported missing, the latest a 13-year-old girl.

An official from Kolkata's Childline had just received a tip-off that a police officer was keeping a boy, aged 12, as child labour in a district close to Sealdah. "I had better go to investigate," he said, leaving the room.

Calls to the service increased 50% last year to 3,000. Police data for West Bengal, the district that includes Sealdah, reveals that 639 children have so far been reported missing this month. A further 647 have been found. On Friday, nine children were reported missing with another 38 recovered.

Platform 1 lies separate from the station's main buildings and can be accessed by anyone throughout the night. For this reason Dey classifies it among Sealdah's most perilous platforms. At 4.30pm on 18 July a group of girls, no older than 12 and most of whom were orphans, were stroking a stray dog. For six months they had lived on the platform, enduring constant danger. Groups of men from Kolkata's hinterland routinely travel to Sealdah with the primary ambition of "messing around" with the girls.

"Six months ago we had to rescue three of them from a large group of men who were engaging them," said Dey. As he spoke an elderly man leant through the station's perimeter fence and began violently groping one of the girls.

However, platform 4a is the most notorious. Lined by a dense tropical garden, dreadful crimes happen among the foliage at night, according to Dey: "People go missing from there."

The latest police statistics suggest kidnapping in India is a growing crime, with the reported abductions of children rising from 15,284 in 2011 to 41,893 in 2015. Cini's database chronicling why children materialise at Sealdah reveals that a quarter are trafficked, but abuse and poverty prompt many to flee home.

Compounding the issue are complexities in actually identifying traffickers. "They look like anybody else. Sometimes the children are forced to smile while they are accompanying them, making it even more difficult to identify victims," said Dey's colleague, Anwesha Sen.

For the children who live on Sealdah's platforms, spotting potential abductors is equally fraught. Akil, 15, who has slept at Sealdah for 18 months, said victims wouldn't recognise a trafficker until the point of abduction. "Traffickers are hard to identify with our bare eyes. Once [I saw] a child getting stolen from the station when they were sleeping. But I have heard of kidnappers being caught at the station," he said.

Joju Varghese, strategic officer for the international charity Railway Children, which supports the work of Cini, said: "It's very difficult to find children once they have been trafficked because they're shifted to many locations."

Two boys rescued from Sealdah's platforms are housed in a "child friendly" police station before they are reunited with their families. Photograph: Mark Townsend/The Observer

Sex workers gather at dusk close to the station's main ticket counter. Many of them were trafficked to Sealdah and pressed into prostitution, some with the blessing of families who had exhausted all other avenues for generating income.

"They give the money to their family, they don't mind as long as she's earning," said Manidipa Ghosh, assistant director of Cini Kolkata. Traffickers seeking sex workers trawl the villages that dot the lower Ganges delta for new victims.

Some are taken straight from Sealdah to Sonagachi, the largest red light district in South Asia. An estimated 12,000 sex workers are based there, less than two miles from Sealdah. "Some are sold and become untraceable," said Ghosh.

The children who live on the platforms quickly become used to the sex workers, who congregate in a narrow concourse close to the main station entrance. "There are a lot but they do not disturb us, they are just focused on servicing their clients and leave us alone," said Paras, 13, who sleeps near platform 1 with his mother, who earns a maximum 200 rupees (£2.28) a day washing dishes at a roadside bhel puri stand.

Nearby is the station's sprawling car park, where scores of minors sleep at night. One of them is Akil, who said he was aware of children being stolen from there. "I can never relax: a lot of children and girls sleep there and they are very vulnerable. The problem is that it's an open place, anybody can enter. Drunks with bad intentions come, sometimes they touch the girls badly. Kidnappers and traffickers go to see the children," said the teenager.

Akil believes the area at night is a lottery for many children. "No part of the station is safe, but the parking area is dangerous and people are free to enter. Some are addicted or drunkards who beat up children. They use foul language and hit us. Many times I've been beaten by drunkards, sometimes every day."

Others say police brutality is a persistent problem. Deva, 13, sleeps in the parking area and describes police violence as a more pernicious threat than traffickers. "They wake us up and hit us or chase me and my friends."

Yet, overall, he describes life at Sealdah as "very enjoyable". During the day his section of the car park - at the back beneath a row of trees - is frequently transformed into a makeshift football or cricket pitch.

His idol is Barcelona's Lionel Messi and his plan is to play international football. "I'll play for whoever wants me," said Deva.

Others view life in Sealdah as a long holiday. Utpal, 13, was forced into child labour by his father when he was nine years old, spending 12 hours a day making cotton bags in a Kolkata factory. "I was exploited and never got time to play or was fed properly."

Having run away from home, he plays cricket by day, sleeps on parked cars at night and has started studying at Cini's day centre situated behind Sealdah station. His diminutive friend, Bijay, 13, also relishes life at the station and has slept in Sealdah's VIP parking area with his parents since he was four. "I really enjoy it, sometimes I go to the playground on College Street. There I have the best of times."

Most have learned that developing a narcotic habit makes them vulnerable, particularly sniffing Dendrite, the glue that - due to its price and potency - is popular among Sealdah's street children. Akil said that seven of his 18-strong peer group were Dendrite addicts. "It makes them hallucinate and go into a trance, their skin gets patchy, they lose track of reality and become unconscious."

A modest phial of Dendrite costs five rupees (6p) and can last 24 hours.

No part of the station is safe, but the parking area is dangerous and people are free to enter. Some are addicted or drunkards who beat up children

Some have resisted such temptations for as long as they can remember. Rosheen, aged 12, was born on the station steps outside its main entrance, the latest generation of her family to have lived in one of the most public places it is possible to imagine.

Her bedroom is a flattened cardboard box laid two metres from Sealdah's entrance. Her mother collects plastic bottles to pay for food. Rosheen says she has learned to survive by spotting potentially dodgy people among the thousands that pass her bed each hour. "Who knows what the intentions of some people are?"

Other minors live in the centre of Sealdah. Opposite Jan Afaar - the official rail canteen - sit a group of mothers with their infants in one of the station's busiest thoroughfares. Taniya, 25, from west Bengal, who has an 18-month-old daughter, said the fear of her child being abducted was constant.

"When I go to the toilet or take a shower I have to leave my children on the platform, which is not very safe because so many people are moving about. Even if you are gone five minutes you're always worried. I have heard of children getting stolen. The rate is low at the moment and organisations have reported cases to the police."

She described "close shaves" where she has found strangers attempting to play with her daughter. The risk of passing strangers touching their children inappropriately is often discussed among the mothers. "You have to keep your eyes open, bad touches can happen. We have heard about negative things happening."

Regardless of vigilance, negative things keep on occurring at Sealdah. As rush hour approached on 18 July, a group of children were playing in the station's far south-eastern corner, close to platform 14a. All were oblivious to the abduction of the three-year-old from the same spot a month earlier, already the slightest of entries among India's ever multiplying list of lost children.

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The scandal of the missing children abducted from India's railway stations

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When they awoke, their child had gone. As the parents slept near platform 14a, someone had carefully bent down between them and taken their three-year-old daughter. Astonished, they demanded to review the CCTV images but found there was no footage. No witnesses came forward.

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Article about children getting lost in India

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Article about children getting lost in India

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Investigations take time and gathering information where your child might be and the longer the investigation takes there are possibilities that their child might be moved overseas which makes the investigation difficult. Police departments should be able to have easy access to save time locating the child.

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Shehzadi Malik has watched the seven-minute video clip on her phone a few hundred times these past three months. Sometimes she is looking for clues. Sometimes she is just watching it, empty of hope. Sometimes she is simply looking at her nine-year-old boy, Kabir. This CCTV footage was given to Malik by the police, on a pen drive, and it's the last record she has of her son, who went missing on May 11 this year.

In the video, at 2.25 p.m. that day, Kabir enters the frame; he is walking back from tuitions in Delhi's Nizamuddin colony - as he has done for two years - carrying a big red-and-black schoolbag on his back. His gait is jaunty but he seems to be in no particular hurry; at one point he appears to mock-bowl with his left hand, at another he stops to pick up something from the pavement, maybe a coin or a pebble. He doesn't exit the frame, he gets obscured by a row of Ashoka trees, then the video ends. "Can you see him standing behind the tree?" Malik asks, pointing to a corner of the phone screen where a portion of his black trousers is just about visible through the foliage. " Maybe he is waiting for someone, or talking to someone. He is a friendly child, he spoke to everyone in the area," she says, the possibilities clearly confounding her.
Door-to-door search
From under a mattress in her single-room home in Sarai Kale Khan village, a few kilometres from where the boy was last seen, Malik a domestic help, pulls out a wad of posters with information about the missing child, and a copy of the FIR. The police helped initially, pasting posters of the boy around the colony, and told her they have looked for him in hospitals, children's shelters, even in stormwater drains.

"The police say they're still looking, but I am not sure what they've done after the initial search. They keep asking if we have enemies who might have taken the child." With no headway made by the police, Malik's husband Aamin, a mechanic, has taken it upon himself to go door to door with the posters. He has distributed them around the neighbourhood and beyond, in Gurugram, Ghaziabad and Noida, and on the instruction of astrologers, even travelled as far as Aligarh and Mathura looking for his son in orphanages. He hasn't found answers, but continues his search, however far it may take him, if for nothing else, then " bas dil ki tasalli ke liye (at least for my peace of mind)," he says.

Helping neither the investigation nor Aamin's peace of mind is a WhatsApp forward that has landed on his phone featuring a purported 'child lifter'. In the video - a professionally directed one with fades and percussion to boot - a woman in dark glasses physically carries away children from bus stops and sidewalks after rendering them unconscious with drugged toffees or chloroform.

We may never know Kabir's story. But for now, he is part of a staggering statistic of missing children in India: 63,407 children went missing in 2016, according to the latest data from National Crime Records Bureau, which translates to an average of 174 every day. More disquietingly, 50% of the children who have gone missing until 2016 have stayed untraced.

But the stories behind the statistics are complex, sometimes counterintuitive, and vastly different from what 'child lifting' rumours on social media will have us believe about 'gangs with weapons' or 'travelling vagrants'. It can be a 14-year-old who runs away with a 'friend' only to realise she's actually been trafficked. Or it could be a 17-year-old girl who elopes with her lover, and her family back home reports her as 'kidnapped'. It could be a neighbour promising a job for a young boy but instead enslaving him in a factory; or a kid who runs away from an abusive father; and sometimes, it could just be a star-struck girl boarding a train to see her favourite actor in a big city and getting lost there.

Salim*, 12, was abducted by his neighbour in Raghunathpur village in Bihar's Katihar district. In May 2016, the boy left with a man who had promised his parents that he would educate and employ Salim in his jewellery workshop in Old Delhi. Salim's father Basheer, who works as a mason in Gurugram, realised a few days later that he had lost all trace of Salim and their neighbour, and that's when he decided it was time to file a police complaint. He gave the police details of the suspect: his name, where he worked. When word got around, his neighbour's family offered Basheer money to withdraw the case, but he refused. "We just wanted our boy back," he says. Months later, the police had made no progress. "In fact, they even asked us to take the money and withdraw the case," says Basheer. So the mason took off from work to go to Delhi and scour the city for clues.

It took the police a year and a half, with some nudging from Delhi-based child rights NGO, Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA), who Basheer approached, to locate Salim. That year, BBA and the police conducted a rescue operation in Old Delhi and found 16 child labourers in small workshops, including one that belonged to Basheer's neighbour. Salim was not among them. A massive search operation followed; his photograph and details were shared with child care institutions and Child Welfare Committees across 20 States. Finally, in March this year, Salim was traced to a dargah in Haridwar.
Structured nexus
He is now back home with his parents, but continues to be deeply traumatised by the experience. He hasn't been able to say how he reached Haridwar or what transpired at the factory except that he saw other children being beaten. The day we spoke to Basheer, his wife had taken their son to see a psychologist. "Salim doesn't talk to us much any more," says Basheer.

Salim was fortunate to have been rescued at all. "The longer the police takes to investigate, the less likely the child will ever be found. Trafficking is a structured nexus where the child changes hands, travels between States," says Soha Moitra, director (northern region), Child Rights and You.

Despite a 2013 Supreme Court order that mandates that the police register an FIR of kidnapping when they receive a missing child complaint, "there is still huge hesitation on the part of the police," says Moitra. "Missing children cases are often dismissed, families are told they have 'run away' and 'will come back'. Precious time is wasted; the child could well be out of the State before investigation begins."

When Meghana, 14, was rescued after eight months, she was already 22 weeks pregnant. It took a call from her, with a mobile phone she managed to lay her hands on, for the police to track her down to Chandpur in Uttar Pradesh. Meghana belongs to Kalyan in Maharashtra. She had been abducted by a 23-year-old, a regular customer at the eatery her father worked in. They used to chat and within days of their meeting, he had convinced her to come away with him. It isn't clear if he had promised marriage. "He said he would enrol me in a good school," says Meghana.

She boarded a train with the man last July, and that was the beginning of her nightmare. The man imprisoned her in a house he shared with his extended family. "He hit me and raped me every day. He wouldn't let me leave the house," says Meghana. Meanwhile, her parents had filed a missing child complaint. They even told the police they suspected this man, but there was no headway. Fortunately, Meghna managed to get hold of a phone and dialled her aunt's number. "I told her everything and she said she would let my parents know." Meghana was rescued in March this year with the help of BBA. Her baby was later born premature and didn't survive. Now, Meghana and her family are trying to look ahead. "All I want is to go to school," she says.

Girls between 12 and 18 account for 66% of the 54,328 children reported as kidnapped in 2016. But with one caveat. "A lot of romantic relationships are reported as kidnapping by parents who don't approve of the relationship," says Bharti Ali, co-founder of Haq, a Delhi-based NGO working for towards child rights. She studied 1,957 cases in Delhi and Mumbai under the POCSO Act, and found a significant number involved consensual sexual relationships. "Courts in such cases tend to acquit the accused on charges of rape, but convict them for kidnapping. Such cases add up to the large number of kidnapping records that we come across."

Indeed, not all children in the 'missing' database have been trafficked.

Mathivanan was 16 when he ran away from home to escape his dysfunctional family in Tamil Nadu's Villupuram district. His mother had died, his father was a drunk, and he didn't have a good relationship with his stepmother. "My parents argued bitterly about money and my father's alcoholism. I didn't want to live with them. I thought I'd run away and get a job somewhere far away," says Mathivanan, now 19.

He was found wandering at Villupuram railway station by volunteers of an NGO, Scope India. When he told them he didn't want to return home, they persuaded him to move into a children's shelter. The NGO reached out to his siblings and family, and after much counselling, Mathivanan has now returned home.

Every five minutes, a child lands up unaccompanied on the country's railway platforms, according to data from Railway Children, an international organisation working with street children. Many of these 'missing children' have run away to escape abuse at home or corporal punishment in school or sometimes to head off to a big city to 'become a film actor', says the Railway Children India report published last month.

"We once found a young girl who had travelled 500 km from Theni to Chennai to meet her idol, the then Chief Minister Jayalalithaa," says Sheila Charles Mohan, member of the Child Welfare Committee in Chennai. Then there are children who go missing 'seasonally', for instance, during exam time or on the day results are announced, she says.

With 50% of missing children remaining untraced, Moitra believes there needs to be greater coordination between child welfare bodies and the police. Ali calls for police reform, capacity building and trained human resources to crack these cases. "Tracking mobile phones from which a child has called, mapping vulnerable areas, all this could help in investigation and prevention," she says.
Tech support
A senior officer with the Delhi Police, however, contests the 50% figure. "Families often don't report back to the police when a child has been found," he says. Delhi was one of the first to begin filing FIRs for missing children and to use a facial recognition system (FRS) to identify them, he says. The majority of cases involve children who have run away on their own, the officer believes, and trafficking constitutes no more than "2 or 3%" of the cases.

Inspector A.S. Thahira is in the middle of a rescue and reunion operation when we meet her at her office at the State Crime Records Bureau (SCRB) in Chennai. Thahira is on the phone, speaking in Hindi to a man from Bihar, who has landed in the city to take back his 16-year-old sister-in-law who ran away from home.

After reuniting several missing adults with their families in the past two years, the SCRB, led by Seema Agrawal, Additional-Director General of Police, has now taken on missing children cases too. The State is in the process of acquiring FRS software to speed up investigations, says Agrawal. In April, the Delhi police was able to trace nearly 3,000 missing children by running FRS on an experimental basis on photographs of children in government homes that were uploaded on TrackChild, an online database of missing children created by the Ministry of Women and Child Development.

This technology could help speed up the process of tracking missing children, says Thahira. "Without FRS, all we have are photographs of thousands of missing children, and it can take days, even months, to trawl through the portal's database and cross-reference each photograph against pictures of children in government homes and shelters."

Salim, Meghana and Mathivanan are just three who have luckily made it back home. Salim is receiving counselling, Meghana is applying to schools, and Mathivanan has decided he will stay home for his younger brother and sister.

Kabir, like the remaining 50%, stays untraced. He appears, however, in the photo gallery of TrackChild, along with hundreds of missing girls and boys whose fates remain unknown.
(*Some names changed to protect privacy.)

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India's missing children: The story WhatsApp forwards don't tell you

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Shehzadi Malik has watched the seven-minute video clip on her phone a few hundred times these past three months. Sometimes she is looking for clues. Sometimes she is just watching it, empty of hope. Sometimes she is simply looking at her nine-year-old boy, Kabir.

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In India abducting and trafficking children is very common by taking someone away that is against their will for money, forced labour, harm or create violence and sexual events from drunks or addicts who usually forces children. Women are more likely to get kidnapped and raped. Nearly 80 thousand cases across India each year are reported and during COVID19 where numbers have increased.

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This presentation is a visual essay on a social issue in India. Getting lost was a key cause in Saroo’s life and it has shown that children getting lost has a huge impact of India’s social issue. I will be going through challenges that children have to face by using Lion as a example.

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The poorest areas of India have the lowest amount of education and indicates that many children are not able to read or write. Societies discuss reasons why your children might be missing but little do the society know that someone's child might be in danger. India has a huge percentage of young children getting married but parents don’t approve of their marriage. It’s easy to convince others by saying “i will give your child education or a healthy lifestyle in the future, if you marry me” and they will believe them because they would want their children to get education and once they leave their homes the child’s life becomes a event of abuse, forced labour, rape etc.

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Akil who had slept at Sealdah once said "I can never relax: a lot of children and girls sleep there and they are very vulnerable. The problem is that it’s an open place, anybody can enter. Drunks with bad intentions come, sometimes they touch the girls badly. Kidnappers and traffickers go to see the children".

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Many children don’t have that type of advantage that Saroo was given, many children are never found for many months or years and they either work in factories that are difficult to locate or they are held overseas doing illegal work for someone.

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Article about children getting lost in India

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Article about children getting lost in India

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Op-Ed Contributor

Children play on makeshift swings, on the outskirts of New Delhi, in May. Credit... Prakash Singh/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

BAREILLY, Uttar Pradesh - One day in April last year, 13-year-old Savitri was walking down a road with her mother in Dataganj district, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, carrying a flask of tea to her father, a laborer at a brick kiln, when five men pulled her into a moving jeep. One of them was from their village.

After Savitri's father was told of her abduction, he hitchhiked to the police station; he couldn't afford to take the bus. The officers set out to look for the man who had been recognized. They couldn't find him, but they demolished his hut. Then they put the matter aside. They didn't file a First Information Report, which is required to open an investigation.

One of the officers present that day told me in October this year that he didn't think they could have done anything more. "Girls run away," he said, with a shrug.

Just like that, Savitri became another statistic - actually, she didn't even become a statistic. Missing from home and then absent on paper, the teenager is a phantom. And she is just one among very many.

It is remarkably difficult to get reliable figures about how many Indian children go missing, but the scale of the problem appears to be staggering. According to the country's Ministry of Women and Child Development, 242,938 children disappeared between 2012 and 2017. But according to TrackChild, a government database, nearly that many children - 237,040 - went missing between 2012 and 2014 alone.

Activists for children's rights, who say that under-registration - as well as underreporting - of missing children is a chronic problem, estimate that the real numbers are much higher. According to Bhuwan Ribhu, a lawyer with Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save the Childhood), an anti-trafficking organization, the figure may reach 500,000 a year.

Several factors account for the disappearances, but perhaps none more so than destitution. At least half of India's minors are said to live in acute poverty. Looking for a missing child requires time, manpower and resources, and the police force in India is short on all of those.

Some police stations have no telephone, or have to provide their own car fuel. Since their performance is evaluated based on the number of cases they solve, officers have an incentive to open only those with a chance of success.

And then many missing children's cases aren't even reported to the police.

Abhijit Banerjee, a director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me recently that "parents may be reluctant to report children who ran away as a result of abuse, sexual and otherwise - which I think is rampant." Some parents sell their children or, deliberately allow unwanted daughters to stray in busy market places.

Just one bad monsoon season can devastate farmers, pushing them toward starvation. Some poor children voluntarily approach people they think are labor contractors, offering their services in exchange for an advance, and fall prey to trafficking networks.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, there were 3,490 cases of child trafficking registered in 2015, the most recent year for which the bureau disclosed figures. But the 2017 Trafficking in Persons Report, which the United States State Department releases annually, says that, "Experts estimate millions of women and children are victims of sex trafficking in India." According to the 2016 Global Slavery Index, India had the largest number of slaves of any country in the world. Again, the lack of hard data about the issue is an issue in itself.

Last year the High Court in New Delhi, where the problem of missing children is especially acute, declared the subject to be of "extreme importance," calling it " as bad as terrorism." The court upbraided the local police for failing to recover more of the children who disappear. Of the 26,761 children who have gone missing in the city during the last five years, only 37 percent have been traced so far.

State governments, the police and charities have access to TrackChild, a government database with searchable photos of children who were formally reported as missing. But between 2012 and 2014, the police filed First Information Reports in only 40 percent of cases.

" Why are they so lifeless, so disinterested? " the Delhi court asked.

As of earlier this month, Savitri's parents had no news about her.

In recent years, public opinion has mobilized against rape, the murder of journalists and suicide among farmers, demanding government action. But not for missing children. To many Indians, Rishi Kant of Shakti Vahini, a social advocacy group, told me by phone from Delhi last month, it is as if these children "are not our own."

One of the stated goals of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is to " inculcate values amongst children." It would do better instead to inculcate the value of children among Indians.

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Opinion | Why Do So Many Indian Children Go Missing? (Published 2017)

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Op-Ed Contributor BAREILLY, Uttar Pradesh - One day in April last year, 13-year-old Savitri was walking down a road with her mother in Dataganj district, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, carrying a flask of tea to her father, a laborer at a brick kiln, when five men pulled her into a moving jeep.

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Abhijit Banerjee told NYTIMES “parents may be reluctant to report children who ran away as a result of abuse, sexual and otherwise-which I think is rampant.” Some parents sell their children or, deliberately allow unwanted daughters to stray in busy market places.

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Taniya had a 18 month old daughter with fear of her child being abducted. She once said "when I go to the toilet or take a shower I have to leave my children on the platform, which is not very safe because so many people are moving about. Even if you are gone five minutes you’re always worried. I have heard of children getting stolen. The rate is low at the moment and organisations have reported cases to the police.”

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Article about children getting lost in India

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Article about children getting lost in India

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Each year numbers increase when a child goes missing. Some children are found but it does not make a difference because once someone is found another person is lost. Some India’s police departments are not quite helpful and I believe that is wrong to do. People should be able to go to police departments with a thought of trust and believing that the police will find their child but instead some parents go further away to look for their child without any protection.

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It is estimated that a child goes missing in India every eight minutes. Many are trafficked as part of a nationwide trade which is separating children from their families.

Millions end up in forced labour, domestic slavery and sex work, in what's become a lucrative industry.

But despite this, it rarely dominates headlines, there's little public outrage, or political will to end it.

The BBC's Rajini Vaidyanathan investigates India's child trafficking networks, and speaks to some of the victims.
Producer/Director: Imogen Anderson, Nick Sturdee. Camera: Sanjay Ganguly, Varun Nayar.

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One every eight minutes: India's missing children

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It is estimated that a child goes missing in India every eight minutes. Many are trafficked as part of a nationwide trade which is separating children from their families. Millions end up in forced labour, domestic slavery and sex work, in what's become a lucrative industry.