With three children going missing every 24 hours in Odisha, the alarm bell is of a quite high order. A whopping number of 3,986 children missing over the last five years from the State are yet to be traced out by the law enforcement agencies.
According to the data available with the State police, a high of around 988 children went missing last year. Significantly, around 65 per cent to 70 per cent missing children were girls. Moreover, top State Crime Branch sources informed that while the age of most missing girls is 14 to 17 years; that of missing boys varied from 11 to 15 years. And most girls’ missing place has been from colleges or schools.
Another significant revelation by top police sources is that most of the places of tracing the missing children in the State have been the railway stations of Puri, Bhubaneswar and Brahmapur. “Significantly, investigations later and the place of tracing clearly show the destinations of missing children were West Bengal, New Delhi, Ahmedabad, Surat, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai,” elaborated a top police official.
As per the data of missing girls available with the police, as many as eight to 10 districts in the State bear the burden; whereas in case of missing boys a high of around 13 districts bear the brunt. While over the years, Sundargarh and Keonjhar registered the maximum cases of girls missing followed by Bhadrak, Jharsuguda, Angul, Ganjam and Jajpur among others, Sambalpur and Ganjam led the pack of missing boys followed by Keonjhar, Jharsuguda, Bhadrak, Khordha, Puri and Angul.
The trend of a majority of missing girls in the age-group of 14-16 was mostly observed in the State’s mining belt and the Jajpur-Bhadrak corridor. The reason: these are the vulnerable pockets where brokers are on the prowl who even go to the extent of exporting female teens to Gulf countries via inter-State rackets, revealed a senior police official.
Moreover, NGOs working in the sector of missing children elaborate the trend discernible in such missing children cases in the State. They found out how some specific districts record higher proportion of missing children where most youth populace move out as labourers to the aforesaid destinations.
“The reasons behind are large-scale poverty, poor job prospects and high dropout in the middle school level in many regions in the State like Ganjam, Sundargarh, Keonjhar, Mayurbhanj, Jajpur-Bhadrak belt, Kandhamal and KBK region. Most, therefore, in the said age-group either move out voluntarily to eke a livelihood or are trapped to supplement as cheap labour,” observed Srikant Das, who works with an NGO on missing children. He added that households having family size of above five with more than three female members have been the target of labour agents or brokers.
However, the Justice Verma Commission while submitting its report to the Supreme Court on missing/trafficked children in the country unambiguously stated that the proliferation of brokers/agents is solely for the cause of political patronage.