NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court today directed the Centre to provide complete data of missing children to the Delhi Police by tomorrow morning, saying it was the duty of the government to cooperate in tracing the kids.
The court wondered how the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD) would serve public interest by withholding the data from the police.
A bench of justices S Muralidhar and I S Mehta said the MWCD shall give access to the Delhi Police to the complete data of missing children, which was accessible to it, by tomorrow morning.
The bench said the order had to be strictly complied with and that a compliance affidavit be filed in four days.
"Its the duty of the MWCD to cooperate with the Delhi Police to ensure that missing children are traced," the bench said and listed the matter for further hearing on May 9.
When the ministry submitted that it would get its own face recognition software (FRS), the court asked why it was mistrusting the police and the task of tracing missing children was largely on the investigating agencies.
The Delhi Police had earlier told the court that it has held a trial run of its newly-acquired FRS for tracing missing children and that they required more details from the Centre regarding the place from where some of the missing children were found.
It had said that "on processing the photographic data of so-far missing children for matching with the records of so-far found children on the newly acquired FRS, the software application gave 2,930 matches between the missing database photographic records and the found database photographs."
The court was told that on examination of the data of 2,930 matched photographs by the Delhi Police, 156 photographs seemed to be of those missing from Delhi.
According to the data received from the ministry on April 6, the number of missing children was 65,906 and found ones were 40,137.
The court had earlier asked the police to run on a trial basis the FRS, developed by a private entity, which could help trace and rescue missing children.
Earlier, NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) had given a proposal to give the software to the Delhi Police free of cost.
Senior counsel H S Phoolka and advocate Prabhsahay Kaur, appearing for the NGO, had submitted in the court that Vision Box, the software developer, has offered the FRS free of cost for one year, provided it was used only for tracing missing children.
The bench was hearing a PIL regarding missing children and was examining ways and means to address the issue of tracing and restoring them to their families.