NEW DELHI: ASI Rajesh Kumar of Panchkula station’s anti-human trafficking unit in Haryana was faced with a Herculean task when he received the case of Rajaram (name changed).
Rajaram, a 12-year-old, is deaf and mute and was living in a child shelter in Najafgarh, separated from his family.
“It was tough for me to help him, but I was determined. I asked him to write or sketch but he struggled with the task. I then decided to check if the child had an Aadhar card. I found that his family was from Gujarat. I called them but got to know that they had relocated. I checked and found that the family had updated their address to Patna.
"I tried to contact them only to find that they had shifted again. Finally, I traced them to Muzaffarpur’s Fatehabad village and the child was reunited with his family,” he added. Kumar had joined the anti-trafficking unit back in 2015.
Initially, he would rescue missing or abandoned children from his state, but soon he started to go beyond boundaries to reunite such children with their families.
“This became a passion... I looked for cases where children were from other states as well. Soon, I was being called by other states to help them find missing children. My sole objective was to reunite these children with their families,” Kumar said.
So far, he has helped around 500 children to return home across the country. Of these, nearly 50 were from Delhi.
“The most challenging part of the work is communicating with the children. Some of them could recollect which city, town or village they hail from. While the majority can hardly describe their neighbourhood. There are so many villages with similar names or landscapes.
In such situations, I would call every village and contact the local sarpanch or police stations and would enquire if there had any been any report of a child going missing.
There’s also the issues of a language barrier. A child from a state like Odisha or the north-eastern states aren’t that well versed in Hindi, so such cases tend to take longer time to solve,” he stated.