Rajesh Kumar used to rescue missing or abandoned children only from Haryana before, but soon he started to go beyond boundaries to reunite such children with their families. He is an ASI in Panchkula station’s anti-human trafficking unit of Haryana and has faced several extraordinarily challenging cases.
In a recent case, he rescued Rajaram, a 12-year-old, who was deaf and mute. He was living in a child shelter in Najafgarh, secluded from his family.
“It was difficult for me to help him, but I was determined. I asked him to write or sketch, but he struggled with the task. I then decided to check if the child had an Aadhar card. I found that his family was from Gujarat. I called them but got to know that they had relocated. I checked and found that the family had updated their address to Patna. I tried to contact them only to find that they had shifted again. Finally, I traced them to Muzaffarpur’s Fatehabad village and, the child was reunited with his family,” he added.
In 2015, this unsung hero had joined the anti-trafficking unit. Initially, he would free missing or neglected children from only his own state, but soon he began to go beyond boundaries to reunite such children with their families.
“This became a passion… I looked for cases where children were from other states as well. Soon, I was being called by other states to help them find missing children. My sole objective was to reunite these children with their families,” Kumar stated.
So far, he has served around 500 children helping them with their safe return to their home sacross the country. Out of these 500, almost 50 were from Delhi.
“The most challenging part of the work is communicating with the children. Some of them could recollect which city, town or village they hail from. At the same time, the majority can merely describe their neighborhood. There are so many villages with similar names or landscapes.
In such situations, I would call every village and contact the local Sarpanch or police stations and inquire if there had been any report of a child going missing. There are also the issues of a language barrier. A child from a state like Odisha or the north-eastern states isn’t that well versed in Hindi, so such cases tend to take longer to solve,” he said.
Rajesh Kumar’s story is truly inspirational and our country needs more selfless & diligent cops like him.
