BENGALURU: Informing the Karnataka High Court that 119 missing children are yet to be traced, the State government said that 353 children who have been traced so far are living with their parents, 10 children are in Child Care Institutions and two children died due to HIV and TB diseases. In all, 484 children are missing from various institutions run by the Department of Women and Child Development, from 2015-16 to October 2021.
The compliance report was placed before the division bench of Acting Chief Justice Alok Aradhe and Justice S Vishwajith Shetty, in response to directions issued in the PIL, filed by social activist KC Rajanna, seeking directions to trace missing children.
The state government explained that out of 119 untraced children, 66 cases are transferred to the Anti-Human Trafficking Unit, and 53 cases are pending in the police stations concerned. On steps taken to trace the missing children, the government stated that complaints have been filed with police stations, as per SOPs modified by the Government of India and National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, if the children are not traced within four months.
Explaining various programmes implemented to trace children, the government told the court that Telangana has developed an app, ‘Darpan’, and that Delhi developed an app for facial recognition to trace missing children, by converting the photo of the child at the time of going missing into an imaginary photo of the child at present. If this technology is implemented in Karnataka, it will be easy to trace missing children, the government informed the court.