Mumbai: Coming down on the Mumbai Police for its failure to find a minor girl reported missing from the city five years ago, the Bombay High Court said it will not hesitate in initiating punitive action against the police department if it doesn’t show results.
A Bench of Justices S.C. Dharamadhikari and Bharati Dangre recently dismissed the police’s submission that it made all possible efforts to trace the girl, before concluded that it was “impossible” to find her. The Bench sought to know why the police failed to make inquiries at “construction sites, domestic help agencies, fishing trawlers, illegal distilleries, automobile garages, etc.”, for those were often the places where most kidnapped or lost children invariably end up.
It observed: “The police machinery folds its hands and says it is impossible to trace the child. They say, we have done everything that is permissible and possible at our end. The report filed does not indicate that all-out efforts are made. No construction sites, illegal distilleries, garages have been raided. We, as citizens, find cars being washed, houses and utensils being cleaned, babies being looked after, all by children employed as helpers or domestic workers all around us. We do not see how the police machinery does not notice all this. Several of these children could be the subjects of the missing complaints lodged with the police.”
The court also dismissed the police’s submission that its success rate of tracing missing children had improved from 66% to 89% in the Konkan region since June this year, saying as long as there existed cases like the present, any statistical achievement was of no use. It wanted to know how many more such cases will it have to intervene in before the police takes more earnest steps.
Cops clueless
While granting the police time till November 30 to trace the girl, it said it was “up to the police now to take the matter in the right earnest”. Else, the court will be constrained to pass strictures. “We will also not hesitate to direct the Home Ministry or the Director General of Police to transfer or remove such officers who are irresponsible, and whose inability in investigating such cases tarnishes the image of the entire police machinery. We will not hesitate to take action ourselves in such cases,” the Bench said.
The court was hearing a plea filed by the mother of the missing girl, which said the girl was eight years old when she went missing in 2012. The police initially suspected she was kidnapped by neighbours over a tiff, but failed to make progress.
