Parliament gets contradictory figures on missing children

By IANS

New Delhi : Contradictory figures were presented in parliament Tuesday on the number of missing children in India, with one statement putting this at 3,916 and another saying the figure for the national capital territory (NCT) of Delhi alone was 7,028 during 2006.


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The first figure was contained in a written reply by Minister of State for Home Manikrao Gavit and was based on statistics complied by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

The other figure was contained in a written reply by Minister of State for Home V. Radhika Selvi that apparently relied on the records of the Delhi Police.

According to Gavit’s figures, only 370 children went into missing in the NCT of Delhi during 2006.

Gavit added a rider to his reply, but even this pointed to a glaring mismatch in the two sets of figures presented by the ministers.

According to Gavit, the NCRB figures “are not an indicator of the total number of missing children in the country as missing persons traced are not traced to NCRB.”

This would mean that only untraced children figure in NCRB records. According to figures furnished by Selvi, the number of such children in the NCT of Delhi was 1,386 – way above the 370 mentioned by Gavit.

Even more surprisingly, Gavit stated that not a single child was reported missing from Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh, just 94 from Uttar Pradesh and a staggering 2,529 from West Bengal.

According to Gavit, the other states and union territories with no cases of missing children against their names were the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Arunachal Pradesh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Goa, Karnataka, Lakshadweep, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura.

Gavit said NCRB “compiles crime statistics on the basis of first information reports received by the police in the country. As missing of persons (sic) is not a cognisable crime, NCRB does not collect statistical information in this regard.

“However, NCRB receives case information from the states/UTs on missing children for the purpose of coordination only,” Gavit added.

Even shorn of bureaucratic jargon, the statement doesn’t explain the contradiction in the figures.

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