About a month after his 74-year-old father went missing, a Kurla resident managed to track down the senior citizen with the help of a search portal of the city railway police. The septuagenarian was traced to a Thane hospital.On July 21, Jaiveer Kabulram Tak had left his Kurla (West) home in the evening for some work, but never returned.His worried family filed a missing complaint with the Kurla police, while his son Vinod, 39, continued to scan various spots across the city, but without much success.Just when hopes were fading for his father, Vinod learnt about a portal called Shodh (www.shodh.gov.in), a search engine dedicated to train accident victims and persons found on railway premises.“Vinod approached us on August 19 with a copy of the missing complaint and a picture of his father. Our team then searched the database on the website and found a photo of Vinod’s father on it,” said a police officer.“I was able to find my father all because of the Shodh team. He had been admitted to the Thane Civil Hospital and was in a very bad shape. He is slowly recovering,” an ecstatic Vinod told Mirror.The railway police said that they had found Tak in an unconscious state on platform number 2 of Thane station about 8.30 pm the same day he went missing. He was taken to the Thane hospital for treatment. Since he could not provide his name or address and no one came looking for him, the police prepared a record and uploaded the data on Shodh portal.Senior officers said 10-12 people die every day on Mumbai’s suburban railway network.“Notwithstanding our efforts to trace the identity of the victims, about 30 per cent cases of railway accidental deaths remain ‘unclaimed’. This gloomy statistics prompted us to launch Shodh, which allows people to access our database of victims without visiting each and every police station, hospitals and mortuaries,” the officer said.The officer said they have told their teams to upload information of all missing and unclaimed victims with whatever details possible so that the data comes handy for their legal heirs.“We understand that not every family is net-savvy. For such people, our personnel help them browse the portal and look for matching details in the database,” he added.Shodh captures the information about a particular victim in three columns. The first column gives out personal details like what the victim was wearing , where s/he was found, etc.The second column has descriptions like height, specific body marks and gender, while the third column is clickable where one can claim the victim, if you are related.