THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: A staggering 43,272 females, including girls, had gone missing in Kerala from 2016 to 2021 and 40,450 (93%) of them were tracked down, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) has said in its flagship report Crime in India 2021. As many as 2,822 — 2,449 women and 373 girls — of them are yet to be tracked.
The report said 37,367 women went missing during the period and 34,918 of them were traced. The number of minor girls who went missing during the same period was 5,905 of which 5,532 were tracked.
The most number of girls had gone missing in 2018 (1,136), while the most number of women went missing in 2019 (8,202). Going by the NCRB data, on an average 984 girls went missing each year and 922 of them were traced. Similarly, 6,227 women went missing each year on an average and 5,819 of them were found.
Former State Police Chief Loknath Behera said Kerala registered one of the best strike rates in detecting missing people. “Ensuring continuity in police probes is a key aspect in tracing missing people. In 2019, I formed two special teams to exclusively probe missing cases. More importance was given to locate the women who had gone missing. All the DySPs of the District Crime Record Bureaus and an SP met each month to review the progress of the investigations. The team managed to track down about 100 women who had gone missing that month,” he said.
“When mentioning missing, it may not always be a case of kidnapping. People elope and go incognito and those incidents are also registered as missing cases,” Behera said.