Mumbai cops renew hunt for missing persons

Taking a serious note of the increasing number of missing persons, the city police have started compiling lists of all those who have gone missing in the past five years. The police will start a re-investigation in an effort to trace them.

According to an estimate, more than 50 persons go missing every day from the city. The maximum numbers who go missing are adolescents and those in the age group of 15-25 years and most are girls. “We are working on it,” said Pratap Dighavkar, deputy commissioner of police.

Generally, every police station is supposed to have a special team of a police sub-inspector and four constables for tracing the missing persons. However, the team is hardly able to function smoothly, as they have to multi-task on other cases too. As a result, the team is, reportedly, not able to give the desired results.

Police sources say that most of the time, the missing persons are found. Out of 10,852 persons who went missing in 2010, at least 8,218 were traced.  The cops will now be making a list of all the missing persons. They will then go to their homes, to find whether they have returned. If they have returned, then the police records will be updated accordingly.

However, if the person has still not returned, then renewed efforts will be made to trace them.

The cops will look out for them and will circulate their photo and information across the city and all police stations. The missing persons bureau will be intimated about the cases once again, so that the renewed investigation can take place at national level.

In January, the Bombay high court directed the state to come up with a policy to trace missing persons. The order was given during a petition filed by Jitendra Singh, whose mentally-challenged 12-year-old went missing in 2010.