NEW DELHI: A woman head constable on Wednesday became the first Delhi Police personnel to get an out-of-turn promotion for tracing missing children under the incentive scheme announced by police commissioner S N Shrivastava. Head constable Seema Dhaka of the Samaypur Badli Police Station has traced 76 missing children in two and half months.
The missing children have been traced not only from Delhi but also from other states as far as Punjab and West Bengal.
“There was a painstaking case in which a seven-year-old boy was rescued from West Bengal. The boy went missing from his house in 2018 and rescued in October 2020 from West Bengal,” Dhaka said.
“A woman had lodged a missing report of her seven-year-old son in 2018. The woman changed her address as well as mobile number and it became very difficult to contact her. We somehow managed to trace her son in West Bengal and went to the village after crossing two rivers,” she said.
The head constable said the boy was not ready to go to his parent’s house. “We got to know that the mother of the boy got married to another man. The boy told us that his step-father did not like him and used to beat him, following which he left his home,” she said.
Dhaka joined the Delhi Police on July 3, 2006. She got promoted in 2014 and became head constable. She was posted in southeast Delhi and remained posted there till 2012.
To motivate the personnel to trace or recover the missing children, the commissioner had issued an incentive scheme on August 5 to the effect that “...any constable/head constable who recovers 50 or more missing children below the age of 14 years (15 children out of them of the age group less than 08 years) within a period of 12 months will be considered for the grant of promotion”.
Further, those who trace more than 15 children in the same period shall be given ‘Asadharan Karya Puraskar’.
“This order has brought a sea change in tracing or recovery of missing children, and more and more children have been traced since August,” said a senior police official.