Two brothers, aged 8 and 9, were playing outside their hut in a slum in Shahbad Diary, on the outskirts of Delhi. And just like that, in the blink of an eye, they were gone – missing for a whole year without a trace. The brothers are among the 107 children that went missing from Shahbad Dairy area between the January and September in 2016.
If 107 seems like a negligible number, RTI data from 2016 shows that a total of 6,921 children are currently missing in Delhi. Add to that 1,500 more who were reported missing in the first five months of 2017 and you have a whopping 8,421 children missing in the National Capital alone.
A dejected father sits clutching the identity photos of his missing boys and a copy of the FIR. “The police didn’t even ask where they were last seen. They didn’t even want to know. Instead they asked my wife, what were you doing not looking after the kids? Eating sh*t at home?” Kunwar Lal recounts, seething with anger.
“Will they come back if people report on it?” his neighbours ask, in hushed whispers, as they gather around him.
“Don’t worry, you gather your people, I will gather my own and we will go to the police,” says Maya, a member of Saksham — an organisation spearheaded by CRY that works for education, health, child rights, and child protection, in the underprivileged section of West Delhi. Maya is also the leader of a women vigilante group, called Baal Sangrakshan Dal, that monitors cases of missing children in the locality.
Citing RTI figures, Maya tells me that children have not only been kidnapped in the area, a dozen were murdered, few others were raped and molested. As per RTI data accessed by Saksham, 13 children were murdered, 18 were sexually abused, and rape attempts were made on seven other children in Shahbad Dairy, all in 2016.
“What can you do? Do you keep an eye on your children or earn money?” Kunwar Lal asks Maya dejectedly.
His words echo through the settlement. Without adult supervision, the children are left to fend for themselves while their parents are away at work. Sometimes the eldest children, who are not much older than their siblings, take up the role of supervisors.
Take the case of Bimala Devi, a cleaner with seven children whom Maya introduced me to. When Bimala is at work, her eldest daughters, Rupa and Ruby - aged 12 and 9 - clean, cook, bathe and feed their siblings.
“When is your mother coming today?” I ask Rupa. “I don’t know,” she says, her eyes fixed on the old rusty television set while her siblings play outside.
These children are left alone for around eight to ten hours every day — almost half a day cramped into tiny spaces without any supervision.
I find two of Rupa’s siblings loitering around a dumping ground, away from their hut.
Of Bimala Devi’s seven kids, only two boys go to school. In fact, education is not even an option for the eldest girls. The girls have dropped out to stay home and watch over their siblings.
The community angandwadis are functional only till 1 pm, that too for children under three years of age. As per the Delhi Government Budget of 2015-16, 300 angandwadis were to double-up as creches to help daily wage labourers. Unfortunately, only 23 of the 300 now serve this function.
Walking through the winding lanes of the slum, I spotted children in every corner, taking care of younger kids.
On a sweltering afternoon, without any adult in sight, there were entire groups of children playing around on their own, and it is from these familiar lanes that children go missing.
The police are not of too much help either. The National Crime Records Bureau records of missing people in 2016, has discrepancies in the very first page of the 1,000-page long report.
Some of the information does not add up, the same photo is used for a number of reports.
“The police here helped us rescue two teenaged girls only after we threatened to sit on a dharna,” says Maya. “Last week, when the two girls went missing, the police said they were runaways.”
In the last few weeks, the Baal Sangrakshan Dal has rescued five missing kids of the locality from brothels, and places in Delhi, UP and even Jammu.
“I tell them if it’s their kids today, it could be yours tomorrow,” says Maya. The women admit that it is easier to deal with officials when they are in a group.
“Once there was a case of abuse of a nine-year-old girl,” Maya recalls, “We were in the CWC office, where an official told the mother, “Why do you give birth to children if you can’t tend to them?”
“This is usually how officials talk to the parents of these children, even before they start doing their job. But I said I’m Maya from Bihar, you will not dare to talk to anybody like that,” she declares with a passionate rage.
“Then everybody must be scared of you now?” I ask.
“Yes, everybody. Even our own men. My husband once said, ‘I’ll break your hands.’ I said, ‘I will break yours too,” a member says gleefully.
(This story has been published in collaboration with Child Rights and You, an NGO in India that works for the upliftment of underprivileged children.)
Quint Lens is a selection of the most vivid imagery created by our in-house pool of talent, and from across the web, created and curated with an eye on for that Quintessential twist. In this section, you can find some of the most refreshing camera and mobile photography documenting current news events, the history and everyday culture of India and the world, heartbreaking stories that can only be conveyed through pictures, celebrations and revolutions; basically, anything that simply needs to be CliQed!
(This admission season, The Quint got experts from CollegeDekho.com on board to answer all your college-related queries. Send us your questions at eduqueries@thequint.com)
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)