Railway stations: Home for missing children in India

An Indian girl holds a can filled with water and walks past railway tracks to defecate in the open in Mumbai, India, Tuesday, June 30, 2015. (AP Photo)

Railway stations usually serve as a medium of transportation for travelers, but for thousands of homeless people, including children, they are ‘home’. Delhi railway stations in India serve as home for most of the children who go missing in the capital city.

As per records, at least 3,321 children were rescued from the two stations in the last three years. This year till June, the railway police has rescued 323 children.

The railway police have instructions to take any unaccompanied minor to the railway police station. Usually, there are many children wandering around the railway stations, which led DCP Sanjay Bhatia to take the initiative of rescuing missing children.

Many of the children are lost, separated from their parents; some flee their homes, a few belong to the nearby slums who come to stay here and get addicted to cheap drugs.

Explaining why most of the missing children end up at railway stations, Bhatia said, “A railway station is like a small township. There are fans, toilets, parked trains, free water and cheap food available round-the-clock. There were cases where the homeless children had started working but stayed at the stations. Many children who flee homes come here to take the trains but end up staying here.”

Police helped many of those who had fled from their parents to return home and reunited them with their families. Many who were clueless about their homes were adopted by an NGO.

But the story doesn’t end there. According to the Delhi Police, on an average nearly 20 children go missing from the national capital on a daily basis, linking the disappeared kids to the human trafficking mafia.

Over 1 lakh children go missing every year in India, with an average of 45% of them remaining untraced.

Compared to its neighboring countries Pakistan, where according to official figures around 3,000 children go missing per year, and China, the most populous nation, where official figures put the number of missing children at around 10,000 every year, India’s official count is drastically high.

National Crime Records Bureau, in fact, estimates missing children figures in India in terms of one child going missing in the country every eight minutes.

Apparently, 55% per cent of those missing are girls and those who remain untraced are feared of having been either killed or pushed into begging or prostitution ploys.