New Delhi: Till October this year, head constable Seema was just another cop in the Metro unit. In the last 42 days, her otherwise uneventful career changed for good as she managed to trace 21 missing children within a short span of time. While many of those found were missing for months, some had gone off the radar just a day ago.While performing this extraordinary feat, most of Seema’s time in the past one and a half months was spent conducting raids in UP and Haryana, scouting temples and mosques and scanning the ZIPNET, the website for missing children.Posted at Metro’s Janakpuri station, Seema achieved her objective with meticulous planning and on-ground efforts, said a senior police officer. “She extensively engaged in studying the modus operandi, identification of patterns, information development, tracking movements and pitching and following leads,” he added.Seema began the probe by local inquiries at bus stops, railway and Metro stations and children’s homes. This, coupled with technical surveillance, threw up crucial leads. “She traced the children from Delhi and other states and handed them over to the investigating officers of the police stations concerned. The missing persons squad was also intimated, and the children were united with their parents after verification,” said an officer.At least four of the 21 cases required Seema to go out of her way to develop leads. One such case was of a girl missing from Dabri since March. She had been lured away by a youth and the two had been traceless for around nine months. After getting some technical leads, Seema questioned dozens of shopkeepers and finally recovered the girl from a house in Shiv Vihar.In another case of a 13-year-old girl missing from Mundka, Seema tracked a few blank calls received by the girl’s parents. The number turned out to be of the brother of the boy who had abducted the girl. The girl called up her parents to listen to their voice, but never spoke anything out of fear. The number was tracked to Bareilly and the girl was recovered.A boy, who had been abducted and taken to Sampla in Haryana, where he was working in a parking lot, was also recovered by Seema. The boy’s call to his parents led Seema to his location. It took 10 days to trace him as the phone used by him was switched off.The hunt for a 10-year-old missing boy took Seema on a tour of a dozen temples and mosques. He was finally recovered from near a Sai Baba temple in Najafgarh within 24 hours of going missing on December 26.The Metro unit started tracing missing children in December 2020 after former police commissioner SN Shrivastava incentivised it by making the act worthy of a reward, apart from out-of-turn promotion. Since then, the Metro unit has traced 553 children. Of this, 270 children were recovered this year.
Source: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/this-seema-has-no-limits-21-kids-traced-in-42-days/articleshow/96605123.cms