Engagement of the police with the election shoved the ‘Operation Smile’- launched two years ago to recover missing children and re-unite them with their families-in the back-burner. Despite 92 children having gone missing from the holy city in a few months, the local police sound clueless. However, with the dust of electioneering having settled, police say that work would pick up momentum now.
As per the data available from the office of senior superintendent of police, 56 girls and 36 boys had gone missing in one year. Besides, 302 adults have also been reported missing from Haridwar district. Haridwar being a pilgrimage centre, the possibility of human trafficking is high with people coming here all the year round from across the country. The city has a trafficking cell which was instrumental in the past for rescuing the missing children from the clutches of the trafficking gangs operating from Jharkhand and some other states.
In October last year, a person came to Haridwar to perform the last rites of his father. His two- year- old child went missing from a train stranded at the railway station.
The police are yet to trace him till date. A family from Jharkhand which had been staying in Haridwar for the past few years complained that their two children had been lifted from a slum near CCR Tower in the city area at night when the mother and her kids were asleep. They are yet to be traced.
The rising graph of the missing children is alarming for the district authorities. In a year, 394 people- 197 men, 105 women and 92 kids- went missing. The kids who went missing are mainly in the age group of 11 to 15 with 15 of them hailing from Haridwar.
Speaking to The Pioneer, Haridwar SSP Krishna Kumar said, “Now the polls are over and we are revisiting the matters of missing children. Things were stalled for some time due to the election preparations. All the police stations are being regularly asked to speed up investigation to trace and recover the missing children.”