S-I Rakesh Pundir takes a photograph of Rahul and Shakuntala. The 17-year-old was reunited with his mother within a week. (Express photo by Praveen Khanna) S-I Rakesh Pundir takes a photograph of Rahul and Shakuntala. The 17-year-old was reunited with his mother within a week. (Express photo by Praveen Khanna)

On a breezy January morning, Rakesh Pundir sets off to unite yet another mother with her lost child. The 40-year-old sub-inspector with the Ghaziabad police and his team of two constables — Satya Prakash and Sunil Kumar — are headed from Vijay Nagar police station in Ghaziabad to Hazrat Nizamuddin Railway Station in southeast Delhi. “Shakuntala is coming from Goa. We will take her to her son Rahul, lodged in a shelter home in Delhi,” says Pundir.

Clearly, the Ghaziabad police are going outside their area of jurisdiction. “Who cares about that?” says Pundir. “We have restored 23 children to their families this month so far. And all but one were beyond our area of jurisdiction.”

Pundir, Prakash and Kumar form one of the 25 teams, comprising a total of 100 personnel, deployed by the Ghaziabad police to Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Bihar and Maharashtra. The drive was part of a nationwide, month-long programme termed Operation Smile, under which police forces were directed by the Centre to restore missing children to their families all through January.

It was the Ghaziabad police that first come up with the modus operandi, when they recovered 227 children in September-October last year. An impressed Centre asked other states to follow.

The Ghaziabad police’s mechanism: visit shelter homes, railway stations, bus stands etc where missing children are mostly found; click and WhatsApp their photographs to officers of police stations near the children’s local addresses; and arrange for video-chats once possible parents have been traced.

Says Ghaziabad DSP Ranvijay Singh, “(In the current drive) 311 children have been restored… In September, we had gone looking for 122 missing children of Ghaziabad (for whom FIRs had been lodged) and ended up recovering 227. Whenever our cops would go to shelter homes, other children would plead with them to re-unite them with their families.”

Pundir’s team has been doing the rounds of five shelter homes in Delhi housing children.

They reach the Hazrat Nizamuddin Railway Station at 11 am. Shakuntala, who reached Delhi that morning and checked into the Chauhan guest house nearby, is waiting for them. She is strikingly calm. “That boy has been practically missing for two years,” she says. “He runs away every six months. Last time I travelled to Kanpur to get him back. I have left behind my 12-year-old daughter with my neighbour, as my husband is mentally unsound. Who knows, Rahul might run away again.”

A construction labourer, Shakuntala was not able to send Rahul to school. He had been found loitering at the New Delhi Railway Station in December and was sent by the Child Welfare Committee (CWC) to Prayas, a shelter home in Jahangirpuri, north-west Delhi.

Boys of different age groups are clubbed together at the home. Alka Singh, the counsellor, asks a boy to fetch Rahul, “woh Goa wala bachcha”. In a few minutes, Rahul arrives — a tall, lean teenager. Hands casually tucked into jacket pockets, he smiles at his mother. “Who is she?” asks Singh. “Mummy,” the 17-year-old replies, as Shakuntala glares. They don’t speak to each other or rush to hug.

When Pundir asks them to pose for a photograph, Shakuntala’s eyes well up and she allows a slight smile. Pundir sends the photograph by WhatsApp to ‘Operation Smile’ — another statistic in their “progress”.

Singh asks Shakuntala for her voter ID, to establish her identity. She only has a photocopy. Pundir, used to such problems, hands over a letter testifying that Rahul has recognised Shakuntala as his mother.

As he waits for the paperwork to get over, Pundir takes out a diary with data on missing children. “I have to sort out details of Jitender Thakur and Pawan Yadav,” he says. Jitender, a boy of about 10 also lodged at Prayas, had given an address in ‘Malikpur gaon’, Katihar, Bihar, that turned out to be incorrect. Questioned by Pundir again, Jitendra insists, “Mukhiya ke ghar ke paas hai (My home is near the village head’s).” Pundir finds out what the neighbouring village to Jitender’s is. “Perhaps that’s his village,” he says.

Address, Pundir adds, is the “biggest challenge”. “Most children are poor and illiterate, they don’t know their addresses. The families, too, often don’t file an FIR, making the local police’s job even more difficult.”

Pawan had given his address as “Jadi ki Basti, Hazaribagh”. Pundir talks to the shy boy again. “It’s Jaredi Basti, Bokaro,” Pawan confesses, breaking down. “My friends said if I tell the truth, I will be put in jail.”

Pundir asks why he ran away. “My father passed away. My mother put me in a boarding school in Hazaribagh,” he says. The S-I reassures him: “Mummy doesn’t hate you, she only wanted you to go to a good school. Now, she will never let you go.”

Sensitivity, says Pundir, is the most important aspect of training for Operation Smile. “We were told to work from the heart, to be polite with children, give them toffees or ice-cream, and never ask questions directly,” he says, confessing that earlier they would just shoo away such children.

The other aspects of the “one-day” training before joining Operation Smile include a thorough briefing on the Juvenile Justice Act, learning to use the Internet and to network with police stations across the country.

“Technology has been a boon,” Pundir adds. “Now it takes between a day and a week to reunite a child with his family.”

For example, he met Rahul at Prayas on January 22; three days later, he located and spoke to the mother; she boarded the train to Delhi on January 27. “Rahul had said he lived in Colgate factory, Kundli gate, Goa. A Google search showed one Colgate-Palmolive unit in Kundaim, Goa. I tracked down the police station in the area, spoke to the constable, and WhatsApped him a picture of Rahul. In two days, they put me on to Shakuntala.”

Pundir has been a policeman for over 22 years. “Through my career, I have struggled to meet targets — nab four thieves today, issue five warrants tomorrow, etc. But in Operation Smile, there are no targets, no zabardasti. Even recovering one child would be enough, we were told. Also, it is voluntary. Those interested join.”

Pundir, who was also a part of the September-October drive, says more than half the missing children run away from home after a beating or scolding by either parent. Other reasons include influence of friends, or unpleasant relationship with a step-parent (Rahul too has a stepfather). “But 99 per cent of all missing children do want to return home,” he says.

Pundir heads with Singh, Shakuntula and Rahul to the CWC next. The panel of CWC members seems to know Pundir well. “So, how many more kids are you going to find? You’ve woken up other police teams too. We just had cops from Orissa and West Bengal taking back their kids,” smiles CWC member Reeta Singh.

Before she “restores” Rahul to Shankuntala officially, Singh gives them both a bit of counselling.

It is late afternoon, and Pundir and his team drive the mother and son to a bus stand from where they can go to the Hazrat Nizamuddin Railway Station. The S-I tells Shakuntala about the Goa-bound trains she can catch.

As a bus drives away with them, Pundir says, “Now, I have to reunite Pawan with his mother.”

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