ew Delhi Police Commissioner SN Srivastava was particularly troubled over the 17 children who went missing in his city every day. So he decided to light a fire in the belly of his force and came up with a new approach. If any officer could find 50 missing children in a year their promotion would be fast-tracked. It usually takes constables at least five years to be promoted to head constable, and meeting the target would dramatically speed that up. From January to July, six children under the age of 14 were traced on an average day in the capital. After the commissioner’s incentive was brought in on 6 August, the daily figure over the next three weeks almost trebled to 17 Urgency is vital when it comes to finding missing children. In a city of more than 20 million people, the longer you leave it, the harder it is – even assuming they haven’t moved to another state far away. Instead of taking days to print a poster and stick it on lampposts, police have been driving around the capital blaring details of the missing child from loudspeakers. Sub-inspector Janak Singh of Badarpur police station has traced more than 90 children in recent years. He says the new success isn’t down to new methods. What is different now is a higher level of motivation. “Now there is a clear target of 50 children a year that helps concentrate the mind and efforts and there is also a concrete outcome – the promotion. With a target and reward, a policeman is naturally going to put more energy into the task,” he says. The same procedures are followed as before. The child’s details are entered into the database, notices are placed in newspapers, there are posts on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, and announcements are made in temples and mosques. As Singh says, “children need to eat and find somewhere to lie down and temples and mosques are perfect for this”. If they are lucky, a clue will emerge. Children, invariably from poorer families, go missing for any number of reasons: doing badly in exams, abuse from a stepmother or drunken father, a tiff with a sibling, or simply getting lost. A child goes missing in India every eight minutes. Some are trafficked while others end up as bonded labour in sweatshops, brick kilns or roadside eateries, as servants in homes, or in sex work. For Amod Kanth, a former police officer whose NGO Prayas in New Delhi has looked after runaway children for more than 30 years, the incentive scheme is welcome. “It will energise the police and that’s important because speed is crucial. The longer they are missing, the harder they are to find. The details we need to find their families gradually fade. They lose the emotional connection with their families. They start drifting and move to another state. Once they are beyond the periphery of their home state, it becomes much harder to find them,” he says. Kanth says that tracing children requires the detective skills of a Sherlock Holmes, the patience of a saint, forensic but gentle interviewing skills, perseverance, and a gift for nosing out a clue from the flimsiest of information. Assistant sub-inspector Rajesh Kumar in Panchkula, just outside the capital,has many of these attributes. Kumar has found more than 500 children since 2016. He has learned the hard way that you have to keep digging in the hope of finding a random, seemingly useless piece of information that can crack the case. One child who had been in a home happened to mention in passing that a new bridge had been built in the village where he used to live and that it collapsed soon afterwards. That clue helped locate his family, and they were reunited after seven years apart. “You never know what might lead to a breakthrough. It can be a river running through the village, a butcher’s shop on the corner, a nearby fort where they used to play. In one case, after being interviewed many times over the years, a boy happened to mention how piles of thread used to lie around in his house. That took me to a textile factory and from there we found his father,” says Kumar. Since 2019, a new facial recognition technique has also helped to track down lost children. It works well even if only an old photograph is available and uses phonetics to find placenames that parents and children often misspell. Kumar is a local celebrity for his obsession with reuniting children and their families. It all began the day he visited a children’s home looking for a child and a little girl ran up to him and grabbed his leg, asking: “Have you brought my mama and papa?” While he has never needed an incentive himself, Kumar approves of the scheme: “It’s good. It will yield better results and it holds out more hope for children.” However, Soha Moitra, regional director of Child Rights and You, sounds a note of caution. “In the past, with similar ‘special drives’ to find children in certain states, we saw children being picked up by police from construction sites and temples to meet the target. Because there are loopholes in the data and it often isn’t updated, they can be passed off as missing children when they aren’t,” she says. Moitra believes that safeguards and monitoring should be in place but welcomes the new attention: “Missing children get so little importance that any kind of focus on them is good.”