The Gurgaon Police with the help of the Child Welfare Committee (CWC) have rescued as many as 215 children as a part of Operation Smile in its second phase. Operation Smile is a campaign that aims to trace missing children and reunite them with their families.
According to the data received from the Crime Branch headquarters, a total of 1,084 children were rescued under Operation Smile-I in August, 2015. According to the officials from the CWC, most of the children rescued were working as child labourers. Out of the total rescued children, about 20 per cent were girls working as maids.
“The maximum number of cases that the CWC deals with is of children working as labourers at different places. In most of the cases, the parents know that their child is employed. However, because of the family’s poor financial condition, they have no choice but to let them earn whatever little they can,” said Shakuntala Dhull, the chairperson, CWC.
The officials counseled 48 of the rescued children before handing them over to their parents. Only 14 children were shifted to foster homes.
One of the case studies revealed that children as small as two-years-old and just an hour-year-old also have been rescued during the operation. Since most of these children are from states like West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh; the teams had shown the need for translators, so that these kids could be easily understood and traced back to their native place. But it was surprising to know that none of these teams and CWC have received any translators, despite the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) writing to the police chief of Haryana directing them to enlist the assistance of translators for the second phase of ‘Operation Smile’, so that the rescued children can be understood properly.