U Anand Kumar By

NEW DELHI: As part of the efforts to give the much-needed fillip to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Digital India’ initiative, the Centre on Tuesday launched two novel initiatives -- www.khoyapaya.gov.in to track down missing children and IAP HealthPhone programme to address malnutrition in women and children.

The khoyapaya.gov.in, a brain child of Modi, is a citizen-based website to exchange information on missing and found children, while the IAP HealthPhone is the world’s largest digital mass education programme to address malnutrition in women and children.

While the website was launched jointly by Union Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi, the IAP HealthPhone programme was launched by the Indian Academy of Paediatrics (IAP) in partnership with the Ministry of Women and Child Development and the UNICEF. The programme also has the backing of Vodafone India.

Maintaining that the features of ‘Track Child’ portal were limited, Maneka said everybody could participate in the new ‘khoyapaya’ portal. “The ‘khoyapaya’ website establishes citizen-to-citizen contact and allows everyone to take part in search for missing children. We are trying this type of portal for the first time in the country,” she said. As per the information provided by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), the number of missing children every year is about 70,000. According to the ‘Track Child’ portal, during the January 2012-April 2015 period, the total number of children, who had been found and reunited with their parents was 73,597.

Prasad, meanwhile, said, “We should use technology for the benefit of poor. The launch of this portal gives concrete shape to that great thought. This will help in better coordination to locate the missing children.”

The ‘khoyapaya’ website is an enabling platform, where citizens could report missing children, as well as their sightings, without wasting much time. The ‘found’ children could also be reported on this web portal.

The reporting could be done through text, photographs, videos and other means of transmitting and uploading information. The IAP HealthPhone, on the other hand, is a public-private partnership initiative that leverages the increasing penetration of mobile phones in the country to educate over six million women aged between 13-35.