By IANS
Patna : The Patna High Court Monday ordered the Bihar chief secretary to search for 307 missing children and 432 missing women in the state and submit a report by Aug 2, even as it expressed concern over the rising graph of abductions.
Responding to a pubic interest litigation, it noted the police failure in tracing the missing children and women.
This was not the first time the court pulled up the 18-month-old Nitish Kumar government for its failure to check abductions.
A senior lawyer of the high court quoted a court report as saying that 1,344 cases of kidnappings took place in Bihar between Jan 1 and April 30 this year. In 2006, over 2,000 were kidnapped, according to officials.
Bihar's kidnapping industry is clearly thriving. Lawyers, doctors, contractors and businessmen and school students have been the prime targets of abductors for ransom.
A total of 14,276 abduction cases are pending in various courts in the state.
Nearly 5,000 criminals involved in abduction cases had not yet been arrested despite several court orders in the last six months.
The high court had earlier this year directed the government to trace 144 children and 581 women reported missing since 2001. It also took note of reports that 44 of the abducted children had been killed. The government then informed the court that 1,078 children had been kidnapped in the state since 2001.
The trend puts a question mark over the state government's commitment to check crime after it came to power in November 2005 promising to turn Bihar into a crime free state in three months.