Jahnvi’s mother calls her reunion with her baby an ‘emotional rebirth’. How many parents of missing kids would want to feel the sameIJ Jahnvi was lucky, but where’s the concern for other kids who go missingIJ Social media has taken a big leap from a time when everyone was sceptical of how it could be, to now, when it has become a power centre for social change. How people came together for Jahnvi is a clear case of what happens when social media is used for social good.
Even as her reunification with her parents brings relief to many in the city and across the nation as well, the story doesn’t end here. Statistics however, paint a chilling picture. On average some 20 children go missing from the national Capital every day. Delhi Police manages to recover only few of them as others are never restored to their grieving parents.
Monday was no exception as the country registered the missing reports of scores of children. A resident of Noida in Uttar Pradesh Mahendra Soni has uploaded picture of his 18-year-old nephew Abhay who went missing and is untraceable. Taking cue from the Jahnvi experience, Farhad Kamran, an Afghan national — who after seeing 100 unclaimed bodies at mortuaries across the city for the 151 days — managed to trace his missing mentally challenged brother at Kurukshetra in Haryana in 2012 with the help of pamphlets and aggressive campaign on social media. The Pioneer had taken a lead in highlighting the plight of the Afghan national then.
Whenever a case of a missing person gets reported, police first upload all the details along with pictures on an intranet network — Zonal Integrated Police Network (Zipnet) — which is shared by six States — Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Recently, the Ministry of Women and Child Development created a special website www.trackthemissingchild.gov.in and has linked it with Zipnet to get all the feeds from police.
Within 24 hours of registering a case of kidnapping against unknown persons, flyers are distributed in all the police stations, bus intersections, hospital and markets.
While everyone — the media and police, in particular — deserves to be applauded for finding Jahnvi, is the concern and sense of urgency shown in this case uniform in case of all missing kidsIJ Something to think about.