The State Department of Social Welfare, Women and Child Development (SWCD), and a child rights organisation, Save the Children, launched a calling service on Wednesday for tracing missing children. The missed call service — 1800- 200-23-25 — can be used to report sightings of missing children.
Speaking on the occasion, Secretary of SWCD Dr Rajiv Arun Ekka applauded the concept and said, “This is a good initiative and we will popularize this number in entire State.” As per the missing children tracking website launched in Jharkhand in December 2013, 229 children are missing of which only three have been recovered while 25 have been placed in child care institute.
Sampat Meena, IG (CID) said that in 2013, 270 boys and 283 girls had reportedly gone missing in Jharkhand. “From 2003-3 around 3,000 children have gone missing in the State and we have no information on half of them. The police have managed to recover 1,500 of them. The CID has taken a number of steps to find out the missing children in recent past and this initiative will strengthen our efforts,” she added.
“The missed call helpline works in many ways. “Anyone who wants to report sightings or about missing children only has to give a miss call at 1800-200-23-25, the caller receives a call back to report details of the missing child. The Information gathered on missing child is uploaded in http://trackthemissingchild.gov.in under citizen’s corner and as a follow up, there are plans to send a copy of the information to the relevant police station so that a First Information Report (FIR) is compiled and an investigation starts,” said Mahadev Hansda, State Programme Manager, Save the Children, Jharkhand.
He also claimed that the organisation acknowledges the power of the website and the new helpline will help in increasing its reach. We were concerned by the new system’s limitations in rural areas of the country with poor internet access or low literacy levels, particularly in the largely remote rural areas where children go missing. Given the access to mobile phones in the rural areas and popularity of SMS and voice-based messaging calls (known as IVRS) Save the Children launched a missed call service- 1800- 200-23-25 to report sightings or missing children in November last year,” he added.
Earlier, Save the Children had started promoting the missing children helpline number through voice and SMS campaign on November 29 and December 9-13, in three selected states- Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal. The voice campaigns were done in local language. Duration of voice calls were 30 seconds, around 60 per cent of people listened entire 30second OBD.
“Since the launch of service there 14 reported cases of missing children have come to light from Jharkhand. Till now 78 missing cases have been reported on the helpline number from Jharkhand, West Bengal and Bihar. We had sent 1,10,000 bulk SMSs and 10,000 voice calls in Jharkhand to promote this number. Now we will use various forms of communication to popularise this helpline number,” added Hansda.