When police in Gautam Buddha Nagar started Operation Muskaan on June 18, even they couldn’t imagine they would be able to reunite 96 children with their families. The operation, which continued till August 18, was launched by the Uttar Pradesh DGP to bring families together.
The families of 53 boys and 43 girls, mostly between the ages of five and fifteen, and kept in various child shelters across the state, were traced by nine teams — one from the district’s anti-human trafficking unit (AHTU) and one each under the eight circle officers in the district.
“At the start of the operation, we had 135 missing children cases registered in our police stations. Twenty have been resolved through the operation, and the rest are children who had been missing from different districts or whose cases had not been registered,” said SP Crime Ashok Kumar.
Read more of this in a report by Sukrita Baruah published in The Indian Express....
