When a child goes missing in India, a vast machinery gets activated to trace the child. From an FIR at a neighbourhood police station to CCTNS, Mission Vatsalya, railway rescue operations and Child Welfare Committees, there are a lot of things that happen in the background. A case from Chennai shows why the first few hours, and the connections between these systems, matter.
It was the evening of 19th September 2011 when a child disappeared from a street in Chennai. Surabhi (name changed) was not even two years old when the incident happened. According to the case documents, her father, S Shiva (name changed), would continue the search for the missing child for years. When the incident happened at around 5:30 pm, the little girl was playing outside the family home.
A complaint was filed at Virugambakkam Police Station on the same day and, based on the complaint, an FIR was registered. The disappearance would eventually pass through different investigators, courts and years without producing an answer. The chronology of the investigation and court cases is recorded in an order passed by the Madras High Court in March 2025.
During the initial days of the investigation, the search was extensive. According to media reports, police questioned over 100 people and printed around 300 photographs of Surabhi. Her details were shared with Childline and hospitals. Police teams searched the Koyambedu bus terminal, Vadapalani bus stand, railway stations and areas around the family’s home. However, the child was not found.
However, the case did not go into the cold case cabinet. In 2014, the Madras High Court directed the Central Crime Branch to investigate the matter. A final report was filed in 2021 describing the child as “untraceable”. Another Special Investigation Team (SIT) was ordered by the magistrate in 2023, which also failed to locate the child. In March 2025, the High Court declined to interfere with the closure after recording the police position that efforts to trace the child had failed.
Surabhi’s father did not end his fight to find the child there. He approached the Supreme Court. On 22nd May 2026, the apex court issued directions that reached every police station in the country. The court directed the Ministry of Home Affairs to establish an all-India grid connecting police stations, with a special portal dealing with human trafficking, including missing children and women.
The Court also directed that this architecture be integrated with Mission Vatsalya and the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems, or CCTNS.
More importantly for a family standing at a police station after a child has vanished, the Court made the starting point unambiguous. An FIR has to be registered immediately when information about a missing person reaches the police. The family cannot first be asked to conduct its own search. Police action cannot wait for 24 hours. The Court described the initial period after a disappearance as the “golden hours”, when the possibility of a safe recovery is at its highest.
It raises a simple question that hides an enormously complicated system behind it. What exactly happens after a family tells the police that a child is missing?
The latest national numbers show the scale at which that machinery has to operate. According to the National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) Crime in India page, 98,375 children reportedly went missing in 2024, a rise of 7.8% from 91,296 in 2023. Out of the newly reported missing children, 75,603 were girls, 22,768 were boys and four were transgender children.
Notably, 98,375 is only one part of the picture. At the beginning of 2024, another 48,800 children from earlier years were still untraced. It means that the authorities were dealing with a total pool of 147,175 missing children during the year. NCRB recorded 98,826 children as recovered or traced during 2024, which included missing children traced from previous years. However, by the end of the year, a total of 48,349 children were still missing. West Bengal had the largest total pool at 22,742, followed by Madhya Pradesh at 19,131 and Odisha at 13,495.
It would be incorrect to say that all the children who were traced in 2024 were the children who went missing in that particular year, as the children traced included those who had gone missing in earlier years. The correct comparison is between a total active pool of 147,175 and 98,826 recoveries or tracings during the year. Even then, it describes the movement of the entire caseload, not the probability that a child reported missing in 2024 was found within that year.
This is one reason missing-child statistics need to be read differently from many conventional crime numbers. There is a flow of new cases every year, but there is also a stock of older unresolved cases that moves from one year into the next.
There is one more important aspect of the data that cannot be overlooked. More than three out of every four children newly reported missing in 2024 were girls. The pattern that was seen in 2024 was not a new phenomenon. A 2024 research study commissioned by the National Human Rights Commission noted that girls had consistently formed a disproportionate share of missing children in the years it examined. Its field study in Delhi also found that girls constituted 71 per cent of its sample. There is always a fear that the girls who went missing were trafficked. However, that is not true in every missing girl case.
In official terminology, “missing child” describes the child’s status, not the reason the child disappeared. The Ministry of Home Affairs’ (MHA) Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for Cases of Missing Children reproduces the definition in Rule 92 of the Juvenile Justice Model Rules. A missing child is one whose whereabouts are unknown to the parents, guardian or person or institution entrusted with the child, irrespective of the circumstances or cause. Until the child is located and his or her safety is established, the child is treated as missing and in need of care and protection.
The same SOP recognises that this group can contain very different circumstances, including cases where a child may be lost, may have left home, may have been abandoned, kidnapped, abducted or trafficked. A child found alone at a market, bus station, railway station, port, airport or hospital may also enter the child-protection system before the authorities know whether anyone has reported that child missing.
NHRC’s research was limited to six police districts in Delhi and a sample based on 166 FIRs, so its findings cannot be projected across India. Within that sample, however, 73% of traced children were classified as runaways. The study identified reasons including relationships or elopement, peer influence, study pressure and disputes at home. In cases involving kidnapping, the circumstances included child labour, human trafficking, sexual exploitation, forced marriage and family disputes. Another 17% had gone to familiar places without informing their families or had lost their way.
NCRB also maintains human-trafficking data separately. In 2024, it recorded 2,135 human-trafficking cases involving 6,018 victims, including 2,297 children. Those figures cannot be merged with the 98,375 children newly reported missing. A missing-child case can develop into a trafficking investigation, but the two datasets measure different things.
The idea that the family of a missing child should wait for 24 hours before the police act has no place in the current legal framework. The Supreme Court’s May 2026 order directs every police station to register an FIR immediately on receiving information about a missing person. It specifically says the police cannot wait for a preliminary inquiry or leave the family to search first. Even if the person returns or is found within 24 hours, the police machinery has to be activated immediately.
The principle did not appear suddenly in 2026. India’s missing-child procedure had already been substantially shaped by the Supreme Court’s directions in the Bachpan Bachao Andolan litigation, the Juvenile Justice Act and Model Rules, and the national missing-child SOP. The MHA SOP itself records the legal framework developed after the Supreme Court’s directions and lays down a uniform process for reporting, tracing, recovery and rehabilitation. A parent is not the only person who can report a missing child. A legal guardian, relative, CWC, Childline, NGO, public servant, police officer or any person aware of the disappearance can provide the information.
Once the complaint enters the police system, the search is supposed to expand beyond the police station where it was lodged. Information such as the child’s photograph, description, identifying features, circumstances of disappearance and probable locations can be circulated through the missing-person and child-tracing machinery. The point is to prevent the case from remaining geographically trapped in the place from which the child disappeared.
That is crucial in India because a child may be reported missing in one district and found in another state. For years, the country tried to solve that problem through a combination of police databases and a separate child-protection technology stack.
TrackChild is a portal developed by the Ministry of Women and Child Development. It was built around a simple yet difficult problem, that is, the police may have a photograph of a missing child in one place while another authority has found the child somewhere else. This portal, which was created for missing and found children, was implemented with multiple stakeholders, including MHA, the Ministry of Railways, States and Union Territories, Child Welfare Committees, Juvenile Justice Boards and the National Legal Services Authority.
According to a government press release, the purpose of the portal is to expedite the search and rehabilitation of missing children across the country. Over time, TrackChild was linked with CCTNS, the Home Ministry’s police information network. The linkage was significant because an FIR about a missing child could then be matched against the child database rather than remaining inside the records of one police station. This interoperability was confirmed by the Ministry in a parliamentary response on missing children in 2024.
However, there are a few limitations with the TrackChild system by design. Much of the formal machinery depended on institutions entering information. A citizen who saw an apparently lost child needed an easier way to put that information into the system. That was the thinking behind Khoya-Paya.
The Khoya-Paya portal was also launched by the Ministry of Women and Child Development in 2015. Unlike the institutional workflow around TrackChild, this portal was designed as a citizen-facing mechanism for information on missing and sighted children. A person could report a missing child or provide information about a child who had been seen somewhere. In a response in Lok Sabha in 2017, the Ministry stated that Khoya-Paya was subsequently integrated as the citizen corner of TrackChild.
This means that the architecture gradually developed two complementary routes. The formal system could receive an FIR, police information and records relating to children who had been found. The citizen side could widen the pool of people capable of supplying information.
Later, the system changed again and is now integrated under Mission Vatsalya.
A major development took place in March 2026 when the Ministry of Women and Child Development announced the revamped unified Mission Vatsalya Portal and brought TrackChild and Khoya-Paya services under it. The portal is intended as a single digital working platform for State Child Protection Societies, District Child Protection Units, Child Welfare Committees, Juvenile Justice Boards, Special Juvenile Police Units and Child Care Institutions.
In July 2026, the Ministry informed Rajya Sabha that TrackChild now functions as a module for missing and found children within Mission Vatsalya. Khoya-Paya remains the citizen-facing facility through which a person can report a missing or sighted child. The unified portal is integrated with CCTNS, allowing missing-child FIR information to be matched with the Mission Vatsalya database.
In practice, a missing child therefore sits at the intersection of two systems that have different purposes. One of them is law enforcement, where the FIR and investigation move through the police system and CCTNS, while the second is child protection.
Mission Vatsalya connects bodies such as CWCs, DCPUs, SJPUs and Child Care Institutions, which may become involved when a child is found, needs protection, cannot immediately be returned home or has to be moved between jurisdictions. The point of integration is to make those two sides communicate.
It is not necessary that every case begins with parents or family members approaching the police. In some cases, the first person to encounter the child is a railway employee, a shopkeeper, another passenger, a police officer or someone who notices a child wandering alone.
In such cases, Child Helpline 1098 provides another entry into the system. Under the current Mission Vatsalya framework, the helpline operates with State and district child-protection functionaries and is integrated with MHA’s Emergency Response Support System, 112. The government’s current Child Helpline framework provides for a 24-hour WCD control room in each State or Union Territory and district-level Child Helpline units located within DCPUs.
MWCD told Rajya Sabha in July 2026 that dedicated WCD control rooms for the Child Helpline had been established in all 36 States and Union Territories. The same reply says 1098 is integrated with both ERSS-112 and the Women Helpline 181.
With such implementation of the processes, the State is no longer only looking for a person. It may now have a child in its custody whose identity, family and circumstances need to be established. Notably, finding a child and sending the child home are, in some cases, not the same operation.
The Juvenile Justice Act gives the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights and State Commissions a formal monitoring role over the implementation of the juvenile justice framework. MWCD reiterated this under Section 109 of the Act in its July 2026 Rajya Sabha response.
One of NCPCR’s most relevant tools for the recovery stage is GHAR, or Go Home and Re-Unite. Launched by NCPCR, GHAR was designed to digitally track the restoration and repatriation of children who are already inside the Juvenile Justice system but need to be sent to another district, another state or, in some cases, another country.
According to the explanation provided by the ministry in Lok Sabha, the portal can digitally transfer a child’s case to the appropriate Child Welfare Committee or Juvenile Justice Board and allows CWCs and District Child Protection Officers to follow progress. It can also flag the need for interpreters or other assistance and link eligible children and families with government schemes during restoration. GHAR has since been integrated into the Mission Vatsalya Portal.
To understand the need for such a system, imagine a child reported missing in Bihar who is found at a station in Mumbai. The authorities first have to establish who the child is. The missing report has to be matched. The family and address may need verification in Bihar. CWCs and DCPUs in two states may have to communicate. The child’s circumstances must be assessed before any handover. Transport and an escort may have to be arranged.
A successful search, therefore, has at least three stages, which are to locate the child, establish the child’s identity and circumstances, and restore the child safely.
The Supreme Court’s May 2026 echos the same as it directs that a recovered person should be restored to the rightful family without unnecessary delay after verification. But if the family or guardian was involved in trafficking or exploitation, the child is not to be sent back to that environment. Responsibility for care and protection then remains with the State, including the CWC.
The same order introduced another identification layer. The Court directed that a recovered missing person be taken for Aadhaar verification, or enrolment where applicable, with the stated purpose of using biometric deduplication to assist identification and restoration. How this direction operates across different ages and circumstances will become clearer as States implement it.
Railway stations occupy a peculiar position in the missing-child system. A child who has left home can move from one city to another in a matter of hours. A child may become separated from their family during a journey. Another may be living around a station. Some are being moved by offenders. Others have simply boarded a train without their families knowing where they went.
NCPCR recognised the particular vulnerability of such children years ago. In 2018, it developed a guidebook for creating a child-friendly and protective environment on the Railways in collaboration with Railway Children India. At its launch, NCPCR specifically referred to children who had run away from difficult situations or become lost and reached railway platforms, where they could become vulnerable to abuse by strangers.
Notably, the Railway Protection Force and Government Railway Police are not the same police force. Police and public order are State subjects. State Governments, through GRP or district police, remain responsible for the prevention, registration and investigation of crimes on the Railways. RPF supplements their work and has major security, assistance and rescue functions on trains and railway premises. The Ministry of Railways explained this division in a 2024 Lok Sabha response.
For missing and vulnerable children, the RPF’s most visible operation is Operation Nanhe Farishte.
Between 2018 and May 2024, RPF reported rescuing 84,119 children under Operation Nanhe Farishte from trains and railway premises. The Ministry of Railways’ detailed release provides year-wise and category-wise figures.
In 2023, RPF rescued 11,794 children under the operation. Of them, 8,916 were classified as runaways, 986 as missing, 1,055 as left behind, 236 as destitute, 156 as kidnapped, 112 as mentally challenged and 237 as street children, alongside other categories.
This means 11,794 cannot be presented as 11,794 missing children recovered from NCRB cases. Operation Nanhe Farishte covers the wider category of children in need of care and protection. Some will match existing missing reports. Others may enter the protection system before a family or police force elsewhere has connected them with such a report.
The Railways’ July 2024 statement said child help desks had been established at more than 135 stations at that point. In October 2024, the Railways and MWCD launched a revised Standard Operating Procedure for vulnerable children found on railway premises, updating the framework built since 2015. The revised SOP defines roles from identifying and documenting a vulnerable child until the child is connected with the CWC.
Civil society organisations also operate inside parts of this official machinery. Railway Children India worked with NCPCR on its railway child-protection guidebook. RPF signed an MoU in 2022 with the Association for Voluntary Action, also known as Bachpan Bachao Andolan, for information sharing, training, sensitisation and the identification of trafficking cases. The RPF-AVA agreement was announced by the Ministry of Railways.
Apart from the routine police machinery, India has periodically conducted concentrated drives to trace missing and vulnerable children. One of the earliest large-scale efforts was Operation Smile, which began as an initiative of Ghaziabad Police in 2014 and was subsequently taken up nationally after the Ministry of Home Affairs asked States and Union Territories to conduct a month-long campaign in January 2015. According to a Lok Sabha response by the Ministry of Home Affairs, more than 9,000 children were rescued or rehabilitated during the first nationwide Operation Smile.
The exercise was followed by Operation Muskaan in July 2015, during which States and Union Territories reported rescuing or rehabilitating 19,742 children. MHA later organised further phases, including Operation Smile-II in January 2016 and subsequent Muskaan drives. These campaigns brought together district police, Anti-Human Trafficking Units and other agencies to search children’s homes, railway stations, bus terminals, streets, religious places and other locations where missing or vulnerable children could be found. The Ministry of Home Affairs’ announcement on Operation Smile-II records the scale and continuation of these searches.
Delhi Police developed its own version of such concentrated tracing through Operation Milap. Anti-Human Trafficking Units visited children’s homes and checked children found at railway platforms, bus stands, roads and other public places against records of missing and kidnapped children.
Railway premises inevitably became an important part of these searches because children who leave home, become separated from their families or are moved from one place to another frequently pass through the railway network. RPF also participated in these wider recovery efforts while developing its own child-rescue mechanisms on railway premises. In 2017, the Railway Protection Force was among the organisations recognised by the Ministry of Home Affairs for its work during Operation Muskaan. The Ministry’s award announcement records RPF’s role in the drive.
The campaigns essentially intensified the search by taking police teams to places where missing and vulnerable children were more likely to be found.
A missing-child investigation can change character as evidence emerges. The older missing-child framework contemplated the transfer of a case to an Anti-Human Trafficking Unit after a child remained untraced for four months. That issue arose directly in Shiva’s litigation. His counsel argued before the Madras High Court that the 2013 MHA guidelines requiring such a transfer had not been followed in Surabhi’s case. The High Court held that the circular, issued after the child’s 2011 disappearance, did not apply retrospectively to that case.
The Supreme Court has now gone further for current investigations. In May 2026, the apex court said that where police have sufficient reason to believe a case involves trafficking, they should not wait for four months. The investigation must be transferred immediately to the specialised unit dealing with trafficking, kidnapping, abduction and allied offences, where such a unit has been constituted.
During the proceedings, former IPS officer PM Nair informed the Court that although AHTUs had been constituted across the country, many were either non-functional on the ground or lacked sufficient powers, manpower and resources. The Court nevertheless treated the issue seriously enough to direct the Union, States and Union Territories to make all AHTUs fully functional and operational.
Railways have developed a parallel anti-trafficking response through Operation AAHT, working alongside police and other agencies. That becomes important once the investigation moves beyond a missing-child search and into routes, recruiters, intermediaries and organised exploitation. Those investigations, along with actual trafficking recoveries, form the next part of this story.
A recovery can solve one problem and uncover several others. The child has to be identified. The circumstances of the disappearance have to be established. Police may have to determine whether an offence occurred. Child-welfare authorities have to decide whether the child needs immediate protection. Where the child has travelled across state lines, the family and address may require verification before the child can be reunited with the family.
The NHRC’s 2024 Delhi study is useful here because it examined not only disappearances but also what happened after recovery. It found that Delhi Police generally followed registration and TrackChild update requirements in the sampled cases, but identified weaknesses in investigation, follow-up and rehabilitation. It also found that interstate cases generally took longer and that follow-up with families after children returned home was absent in a majority of the cases studied. These findings are specific to the Delhi sample, but they demonstrate why “traced” and “case completed” are not necessarily the same thing.
This is also where the CWC, DCPU and NCPCR-linked systems become important. A recovered child cannot simply be treated as a piece of data that has moved from an “untraced” column to a “traced” column. The State still has to establish whether going home is safe and, where necessary, provide care, counselling, rehabilitation or institutional protection.
India’s missing-child machinery, therefore, is not a single database but a chain. A family or citizen reports the disappearance. The police register the case and begin the search. CCTNS provides the law-enforcement network. Mission Vatsalya carries the missing-and-found child functions earlier associated with TrackChild and Khoya-Paya. The 1098 helpline gives another route into the child-protection system. Railways, RPF and GRP can encounter the child while he or she is in transit. CWCs and DCPUs handle protection and restoration. GHAR helps move complicated restoration cases between jurisdictions. NCPCR and the State Commissions monitor implementation of the Juvenile Justice framework. If trafficking indicators emerge, specialised investigators are supposed to take over.
The weakness of a chain is usually found at the point where one link has to hand something to another.
Even before the Supreme Court intervened, MWCD had begun consolidating the child-protection technology architecture. By March, TrackChild and Khoya-Paya had been brought under Mission Vatsalya. By July, the Ministry was telling Parliament that Mission Vatsalya was interoperable with CCTNS for matching missing-child FIRs, while GHAR had also been integrated with the platform.
The Supreme Court’s May order pushed the process further. It called for an all-India grid connecting every police station and directed the development of a module integrating the proposed human-trafficking portal, Mission Vatsalya and CCTNS.
When the case returned to the Court on 5th August 2026, the judges were told that consultations with States and other stakeholders were continuing. The Court reiterated that immediate FIR registration applied to missing persons irrespective of age or gender and warned non-compliant States and Union Territories of contempt proceedings. It also ordered that the integration of all relevant portals across the country be completed within six weeks. The matter is scheduled to return to the Court on 5th October 2026.
India is not starting from zero. It has spent years building missing-child databases, police networks, helplines, railway rescue systems, CWCs, DCPUs, NCPCR platforms and specialised anti-trafficking units. What is happening now is an attempt to make those pieces behave more like one system.
For a family, none of those names matter in the first few minutes. CCTNS, TrackChild, Mission Vatsalya, GHAR, AHTUs and SJPUs are abstractions when a child who was there a few minutes ago is suddenly not there.
What matters is whether the first police officer acts immediately. Whether the photograph travels farther than the local police station. Whether somebody who finds the child hundreds of kilometres away can match that child to the original complaint. Whether a railway rescue reaches the appropriate police and child-welfare authorities. Whether a child who cannot explain an address can still be identified. And whether, after the child is found, the system makes sure that going home is actually safe.
Nearly fifteen years after Surabhi disappeared in Chennai, her father’s case has become part of the process through which those connections are being reconsidered nationally.
India already has the people, laws and databases that can participate in a missing-child search. The harder task is making sure information reaches the right one before the golden hours are gone.
And increasingly, that search does not depend only on names, descriptions and databases. Police forces and railway systems have begun using photographs, CCTV networks, facial recognition and other technologies to find a child whose face may appear far from the place where the complaint was filed, or years after the photograph in the original FIR was taken.
India could close part of that gap by creating a dedicated Brahmaputra Dam Monitor, modelled on the Stimson Center’s Mekong Dam Monitor. It could combine satellite imagery with river-gauge readings, rainfall records and seismic data.
In this third and final part, we will unpack every single layer of India’s energy roadmap for the next 20 to 30 years.
This report explores the chemical and industrial shift behind India’s successful 20% ethanol blending (E20) target. It details the molecular benefits of ethanol, such as boosting petrol’s octane rating and reducing emissions.
Selected issues, clear explanations and thoughtful perspectives—delivered when we publish.
