Website to trace missing people

It is a small start to trace people who have gone missing.

The state government plans to design a website with details of missing people. It will have their photographs and will be accessible to all police stations, state Home Minister R.R. Patil said in the state legislative council on Tuesday.

Responding to a calling attention motion raised by the Shiv Sena’s Kiran Pawaskar, Patil said it would be helpful to police stations, particularly the railway and bus stand police outposts to get information to trace missing people.

Patil admitted that the number of missing children in the state, particularly in Mumbai, had risen sharply. There are around 3,800 to 4,000 children reported missing from Mumbai every year. Of them, on an average at least 300 children are never found.

The state government will launch a special drive across the state, particularly in Mumbai, to detect cases in which children are employed, forced into begging or used for other purposes.

Earlier, the Mumbai police had launched such a drive that helped the state to discourage exploitation of children.
More than 13,000 children were freed from the clutches of employers during the drive.

The proposed drive will be undertaken with the help of non-government organisations.

Patil said the government has already set up a special cell in the state police department to trace missing people and to detect cases of child labour.