Given how successful this team has been, there are plans to replicate the model in other areas as well.
In a span of just four months, at least 95 children who were declared missing from one specific region in Delhi have been found and reunited with their families. And it is all due to the efforts of just three cops who had been tasked with finding missing children.
A team of two sub inspectors, Anuj and Divya, are led by a Station House Officer at the Vijay Vihar police station to help bring home missing children.
The number of children going missing is especially high in the Rohini area – the region records about 200 such cases every year.
Image for representation. Photo source: Wikimedia
Realising that the number of missing children wasn’t going down, last June, Divya and Anuj were given specifically just this one task. And the two, who are graduates from Delhi University, started showing results from December when they began to bring back missing children in droves. At last count, they had reached 95, the last child being a girl who had been missing for six years, and was found in North Delhi’s Burari area.
Since the two (who only go by their first names) have at some point lived in Vijay Vihar, their familiarity helped them engage better with the families of missing children and in tracking them. They also work in civilian clothes, hence blending in better. Together they interview families of missing children and keep tabs on them even if those families have moved. Additionally, they also conduct raids and analyse electronic data for clues.
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M N Tiwari, DCP of Rohini, has been quoted by India Times, as saying, “The moment they receive information about a missing child, the team starts tracking the victim’s possible whereabouts and family members who were close to him or her.”
Given the success of the small team so far, Tiwari says that plans are underway to replicate the model in other areas as well.
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