DAINIK NATION BUREAU
Despite operation smile, which was launched to reunite th missing children with their families, 92 children gone missing from the holy city in last few months but police seems clueless. Although they have been saying that their work would get momentum now because they have been eased from election duty.
As per the statics SSP, Haridwar 56 girls and 36 boys have gone missing in one year. Besides, 302 adults have also been reported missing from Haridwar district. Haridwar being a pilgrimage centre, the possibility of human trafficking is high with people coming here all the year round from across the country. The city has a trafficking cell which was instrumental in the past for rescuing the missing children from the clutches of the trafficking gangs operating from Jharkhand and some other states.
In October 2016, a person came to Haridwar to perform the last rites of his father. His two- year- old child went missing from a train stranded at the railway station. The police are yet to recover him. A family from Jharkhand which had been staying in Haridwar for the past few years complained that their two children had been lifted from a slum near CCR Tower in the city area at night when the mother and her kids were asleep. They are yet to be traced.
The increasing graph of the missing children is alarming for the district authorities. In a year, 394 people- 197 men, 105 women and 92 kids- went missing. The kids who went missing are mainly in the age group of 11 to 15 with 15 of them hailing from Haridwar.
Haridwar SSP Krishna Kumar says, “Now the polls are over and we are revisiting the matters of missing children.”