PIL claims over 11,500 children went missing in a year in Gujarat

Ahmedabad:

The Gujarat High court today ordered the state government to file reply regarding a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) claiming that over 11500 children had gone missing from the state in the last one year.

The double bench of Chief Justice R S Reddy and V M Pancholi heard the PIL filed by the petitioner and advocate Girish Das which claimed that as per the statistics shown on a website governed by union ministry of women and child development, the total number of children missing from Gujarat between May 25, 2015 to May 25, 2016 was 22576 of which 11000 were traced leaving over 11500 still missing. The same website put the figures for Andhra Pradesh at mere 200 missing of which 153 were traced.

The PIL also said that the Gujarat police unlike AP did not file regular FIR for a missing child. The state police only puts an janvajog (for information) entry instead. Citing the instance of Delhi High Court ordering CBI to probe a matter of a missing child and starting a missing child cell in the central agency, the petitioner also said that as the district police had limited area of functioning and it can’t effectively investigate many of the cases of missing children especially of abduction and trafficking to areas beyond their jurisdiction. He also urged the court to make the defunct missing child cell of the CBI functional again.

The Government counsel Manisha Lavkumar on the other hand said that the statistics shown in the PIL were not factual. She said that only around 3000 children had gone missing in the last one year of whom only around 200 remained to be traced.

The court ordered the government counsel to present the figures claimed by state on affidavit as a reply and fixed the next date of hearing for June 29.

PTI