Meet Seema Dhaka A Delhi Police Officer Who Rescued 76 Missing Kids In 3 Months!

The first person to get an out of turn promotion for rescuing as many as 76 missing children, Seema Dhaka is truly an inspiration to us all!

Original on the Women’s Web Hindi site. Translated by Madhur Dave

For the first time ever, the Delhi police gave an out of turn promotion to a person who helped rescue children who had gone missing. The promotion was given out to a female head constable Seema Dhaka who has been working with the Delhi Police since 2006.

An initiative to rescue missing children

The Delhi Police Commissioner SN Srivastava had launched an initiative to motivate the police to trace and rescue children who had gone missing. In his initiative, he had said that an out of turn promotion will be granted to any Constable or Head Constable who rescued 50 children under the age of 14 who had gone missing. And Seema Dhaka didn’t just manage to rescue 76 children, she did so in only three months!

The Delhi Police Commissioner shared the news on his Twitter handle.

Women HC Seema Dhaka, PS Samaypur Badli, deserves congratulations for being the first police person to be promoted out of turn for recovering 56 children in 3 months under incentive scheme. Hats off to fighting spirit and joy brought to families. @LtGovDelhi @HMOIndia @PMOIndia

— CP Delhi #DilKiPolice (@CPDelhi) November 18, 2020

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Truly, Dhaka’s work does deserve all the praise it can get. Of the 76 children she rescued, 56 were under the age of 14. And some of them were even from out of Delhi, from regions like Punjab and West Bengal.

All the children had gone missing from one Police jurisdiction of Delhi or the other. In order to rescue the children, Dhaka even sought help from various other states and regions.

What motivated her to rescue the children?

Dhaka was the first girl from her village who would cycle to reach her college. The distance between her college and house was around 6 kilometres. And often there were times when she would see no one in the farms around her while going to or coming from college. There was an eerie silence around her during these times.

In a report by News18, she said, ‘In such a situation if any one man even saw me, he would protect me till I reached a safe place. I loved this about the village. But when I came to Delhi, I rarely saw anyone do the same.’

Talking about her work Dhaka said, ‘I am a mother to an eight-year-old myself and any time I hear the news of any child going missing, I start feeling anxious. And I can’t tolerate the thought of any child being away from his/her family. So during the meeting, I asked the officers if I could work in the Missing Children’s Cell. Thankfully, I had complete support from all the officers.’

What is the real number of missing children?

If you look at the Ministry of Women and Child Development’s website, around every 10 minutes, one child goes missing in India. According to a 2019 report, if you go by these numbers, around 54750 children have been reported missing in the country in the past one year. Of these, only half the children could be traced, and that too, only if the child is reported missing with the police.

If we look at the NCRB data for missing children, the numbers are just as spine chilling. According to the 2016 data, as many as 1,11,569 children were reported missing in the country. Of these, around only half the children were found. Doesn’t this show us the condition of children in the country? In a country that has more than 400 million kids under the age of 18, one where more than 55 percent of the population is youth and kids!

And in a condition like this, we need more and more people like Seema Dhaka who can protect our children. I can only hope that police officers, not just from Delhi, but all across the country, take inspiration from Seema Dhaka and reunite the missing children with their parents.

Picture credits: Twitter and Punjab Kesari

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