It was a strange phone call, says Anuj Bhargava. A man called Arun was calling from Belgium. Sometime in the '80s, said Arun, he'd been sold for $8,000 to a Belgian couple by an orphanage in Chennai. He had an old photograph with him. Of him and a man — the man who had abducted Arun from his family.
Could Anuj help find his family? Anuj, a trustee of the NGO National Centre for Missing Children, called his local newspaper in Indore asking whether they had a correspondent in Chennai and if he could track down Arun's family. Soon, a woman who claimed to be Arun's mother was found. But only a few weekslater, Arun called back to say the search should be called off. Apparently, the police had begun to harass the woman.
Anuj wonders how much longer this will carry on. His website www.missingindiankids .com puts up pictures of missing children from around the country, asking viewers to take printouts and put them up. So far, in 10 years, the website has been able to reunite just six children with their parents. That's a tiny drop in the ocean, considering the government recently put the figure at 12 to 13 lakh missing children in India every year.
Yet, this is not a lost cause. People like Arun, can be reunited with their parents , no matter how many years later the children reappear, often as adults. And a solution is being offered to us from Spain, by Professor Jose A Lorente, a forensic geneticist with the University of Granada most famous for identifying the remains of Christopher Columbus and South American liberator Simon Bolivar. Nowadays, though, he worries more about the world's missing children.
It started in Lima (Peru) a decade ago, while Lorente was there to identify the bodies of some terrorists. When he saw the street kids, he wondered what the police were doing to send them back to their parents. "Nothing," the police said. That spurred him to go to 15 countries — including Guatemala, Peru, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Nepal — to build databanks which store the DNA of parents who have lost children. That way, when the children are found, a search of the DNA databank will allow the child to be reunited the parents.
Lorente, however, has had little luck in India. India has been talking about a national DNA databank — which would encompass the parents of missing children , DNA from the 30,000-50 ,000 dead bodies that are found each year, and from convicted criminals — since 1998, when the idea was first mooted at the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics in Hyderabad, but nothing much has happened. In July 2007, after the abduction and murders of children in Nithari (Noida), the NHRC had in a report recommended that a national database of missing children be compiled on a priority basis. The database would be made up of text and pictures, no DNA was to be collected. But PC Sharma, the former NHRC member who presented the report, says the database was never built. While officials within the NHRC hinted that the responsibility was passed on to the then newlyconstituted National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), Professor Shantha Sinha, chairperson of NCPCR, says she was never made aware of it being passed on to her. But yes, she says, the database is needed.
More optimistically, Prem Narain, secretary of the ministry of women and child development — which will have to take final responsibility for a database or DNA databank of missing children — had said last month that they will soon be inaugurating an online database of such children. To be called Track Child, Narain said he hoped the database would finally help return as many as 40% of kids to their parents. He added Track Child will "definitely be inaugurated by the end of this year or early next year" . But that is not enough. A simple database does not stop illegal adoptions. Today, how do we know that a man or woman giving up a child for adoption is actually that child's parent? "A DNA test would ascertain that," says Lorente. "It would also push down the number of children who are trafficked and forced into prostitution." Lorente's databanks have so far reunited about 550 children with their families, and have stopped 200 illegal adoptions.
Dr VK Kashyap, former chief of the directorate of forensic science services (DFSS), which will finally be responsible for the national DNA databank, says Rs 20 crore had in principle been approved for a pilot project. "The databank would be built on the public-private partnership model. There would, finally, be 30 to 40 collection centres around the country where DNA would be collected. The collection centres would be run by private companies but the central databank would be managed by the government."
He is hard-pressed to answer why it hasn't been done as yet. So is Dr CN Bhattacharya, the current chief of the DFSS. On the phone from Guwahati, where he is touring, he says he has just taken over the DFSS, so it is difficult to say why it's taken so long to build the databank. But he says the pilot project will take off soon. Narain adds that a DNA databank of missing children, while wanted, is difficult to imagine right now. That maybe the numbers are too big here for us to be able to afford it. According to Kashyap, each DNA test should cost about Rs 1,000.
The NGOs are harsher. The government is slow to move, they say, because so many children go missing every year. If the figures are put up for public display , the numbers will add up so fast, there will be a furore. What will the government do then?
Meantime, small disparate efforts are being made to try and stop this flood of missing children. Rishi Kant of the NGO Shakti Vahini talks about starting an emergency number on which worried parents would report the loss of a child. His NGO then will watch out for those children in the railway stations of Delhi and Mumbai, the major distribution points for trafficked children. Kant, who talks about a 16-year-old girl being rescued from the Delhi home of a doctor couple on Friday — she'd been abducted as a four-year-old and for the last year the doctor had been sexually abusing her while his wife had been feeding her anti-pregnancy pills, says his team harangues the police every day to raid another home. Getting the girl to her parents, though, is a different story.
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