Why The Government’s New Portal for Missing Children, “Khoya-Paya,” Is Likely to Do More Harm Than Good

In June 2015, the ministry of women and child development (MWCD) announced the creation of a new web portal for citizens to exchange information on missing and found children. Launched under the umbrella of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Digital India” initiative, it was called Khoya-Paya, which translates to "lost and found." Maneka Gandhi, the minister for women and child development, said the idea had come from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and was “completely unique.”

However, Khoya-Paya is the not the first portal set up by the MWCD to aid the process of finding missing children. In 2006, work began to develop a portal that would allow the coordination of data on missing children across the police, state governments, child homes and volunteer organisations. The portal, called TrackChild, was first launched on a pilot basis in West Bengal. Its success there prompted the WCD minister at the time, Krishna Tirath, to “scale it up nationally” in late 2012, after nearly six years of conceptualisation, planning and training. Still, uptake was slow and in December 2014, letters went out from the centre to all states urging them to make sure that all police and other child-care agencies used TrackChild to enhance the system for finding missing children in India.

Launched close upon the heels of TrackChild, the timing of Khoya-Paya bewildered many child-advocates. Enakshi Ganguly Thukral, a co-founder of Haq, a child rights group that has been active against child trafficking since 2001, told me that while any effort by the government to reunite lost or missing children with their parents is welcome, she was skeptical of a new site being the right step when several portals already existed. Thomas Aquinas, national director of the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Don Bosco National Forum for Young at Risk (DBNF-YaR), told me that he too wondered why the government needed to launch yet another website. In early August, the Supreme Court posed the same question to the MWCD as well.

The MWCD’s response was that Khoya-Paya was intended for citizens to use amongst themselves, and that it was meant to complement TrackChild. Indeed, anyone with a mobile phone number can register on Khoya-Paya. Once registered, a user can then create a missing or found child report directly viewable by every other user: the idea is that bereft parents looking for their children can get in touch with well-intentioned members of the public who report sighting children in need. Parents reporting a missing child can also provide their contact information so that they can be reached by others. What makes Khoya-Paya unique is this ability for the public to interact directly.

However, connecting public sightings to police databases is not a new idea. The reason the announcement of Khoya-Paya faced such scrutiny was partly because the functions it offered were present in TrackChild. “Why is it that before we fix something, and see why it hasn't worked, we move on to the next?,” Thukral asked. “Why not upgrade the existing site and make that Khoya-Paya?”

TrackChild’s model is very similar to that of Global Missing Children's Network, an international network of websites that allow users in 22 countries—including the USA, UK, Australia, South Korea, Argentina, Romania, and Russia. On those sites and on TrackChild, if anyone browsing the official reports of missing or found children thinks they have found a match, they are urged to contact the concerned police station. These sites do not allow the public to interact with each other directly, nor do they display the personal information of parents whose children are missing.

Gandhi also claimed that on TrackChild, “only police communicates with police.” However, even after the launch and while I was reporting for this piece, the TrackChild website had options that allowed the public to browse the police database, report a missing child, look through photographs of missing or found children and inform the police of a sighting.

During the second week of September, some of these these functions were removed from the TrackChild website. The options of informing the police of a missing child or of a sighting through the website are no longer available on the front page. The “Citizen’s Corner” now includes a solitary link: the Khoya-Paya website. Responding to a question at the press conference about how information would be coordinated between Khoya-Paya and child protection services, Gandhi had said, "I can't give you a direct answer right now because I'm not sure how much we need to refine it further. Let's just start and see how it goes.” Although an attempt to connect the two systems seems to be underway, the fact that the public is now being directed to use a citizens' forum is worrisome.

The government appears to have largely left child protection experts out of the design process and conceptualisation of Khoya-Paya. An email query sent by Bharti Ali, the other co-founder of Haq, revealed that none of the child-advocates she knew had been consulted before the site was built. Some, such as Sanjay Gupta, director of Chetna, an NGO dedicated to child protection issues, were invited to see a prototype a month before launch through a demonstration of the site by government representatives. When I spoke to Gupta over the phone, after he had had a chance to explore the website himself, he said that he was shocked by the lack of privacy for parents. “We never went into such detail [during the demo],” he told me. “This is actually a concern. This is bad.”

Although seemingly worthwhile, putting the process of reporting and finding missing children directly into the hands of anyone who uses the site can also have disturbing consequences. To begin with, it jeopardises the privacy of the children. Anant Kumar Asthana, a lawyer in the Delhi High Court who has worked on child rights, believes it is problematic that the site allows anyone to directly publish a child's personal details and photo. “A found child is a child in need of care and protection under Section 2(D) of the Juvenile Justice Act and needs to be brought before a child welfare committee (CWC), who [sic] in turn is exclusively empowered to decide whether his picture or any identity-related detail can be published.” He wrote to me in an email, “In my opinion, the mechanism of Khoya-Paya is not in sync with the Juvenile Justice Act.”

Since entering a missing-child record does not require the filing of an FIR, the citizen peer-to-peer nature of the platform allows the public to cut authorities out of the loop. This too contravenes the provisions of the Juvenile Justice Act. The process, says Gupta, is that "if you find a child somewhere, you have to procure the child in front of a CWC.” The CWC ensures that the correct child has been found and is being returned to a safe environment. Without the involvement of the authorities, it is unclear who will oversee this process.

Another cause for worry among the child-activists and lawyers I spoke to was the website’s potential to be misused for child trafficking or extortion. “[The] portal actually creates a public data base of children who are lost or unaccompanied,” Asthana wrote. “This data or information can be used by child traffickers.” Aquinas’ worry is the same. “Any clever trafficker could register themselves, put up the information of the children on sale and share the code. The possible clients could also register themselves and look at the site. Thus, trafficking will be done under the supervision of government.” Another risk, Aquinas confirmed, is that exposing the parents' contact details could put a lost child further at risk if he or she is found by someone who is unscrupulous, and could get in touch with the parents to demand a ransom.

The most critical question that the site raises is regarding the responsibility for finding missing children. The message Khoya-Paya sends is that parents looking for their children are as good as on their own. A reading of the help section and terms and conditions of Khoya-Paya indicates that the MWCD wants no part to play in the operation of the site. The help section contains a flowchart that advises parents who believe that their child may have been found by someone else to "request contact with reporter of sighting/missing child" and to “proceed with caution.” There is no mention of contacting the authorities. The terms and conditions listed on the website state that the portal “does not authenticate or vet, any information provided by the users,” although it  contradicts the same in the disclaimer, which states that the records go through “preliminary scrutiny.” The terms further absolve the MWCD of any responsibility of monitoring the disputes that may arise among users.

“When a child is missing, it is [sic] responsibility of the state to find the child for you with the help of the state machinery,” said Thukral, before adding, “We can’t put this out into the unregulated public space.” “[D]ealing with missing and found children is a matter where state is direct duty holder and such duty cannot be and should not be diluted or diverted to community in such fashion,” Asthana wrote to me. “Police and investigation agencies have to take responsibility from the beginning.”

To complicate matters further, there are several other websites to track missing children in India. These include ZIPNet—a joint platform operated by the Delhi Police and used by several northern states—and HomeLink, which is operated by the DBNF-YaR. Several states such as Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka also operate their own sites. None of these systems seem to be linked. Aquinas thinks that, at present, it is entirely possible that a child found through one system will still be listed as missing in another, yet the correlation may never be made.

With so many websites and databases operating independently, discrepancies are a given. For instance, as of early September, Khoya-Paya reported that 14 children went missing from the Chandigarh area in Punjab and Haryana during the month of August. TrackChild, which is supposed to contain all cases known to the police, did not display any reports of children who were missing from Chandigarh that month, although it did include a list of missing adults, presumably by mistake. TrackChild alone has nearly 200,000 reports of sightings. As of 14 September, a few months after its launch, Khoya-Paya had 3,256 registered users with 533 missing children and 1341 reports of found children. Even if the website does grow to become as large a database as TrackChild, there is little indication of a process to ensure that the records do not overlap. When I tried to contact MWCD representatives to get clarity on these matters, my queries were passed from one ministry official’s office to the next. I received no response or comment.

The perception amongst child advocates seems to be that Khoya-Paya was a result of the new government trying to prove that it was doing something. In Thukral's opinion, “[The attitude is] okay, let's try it, if it doesn’t work, we’ll try something else. This is a short term, knee-jerk, completely un-thought out from beginning to end, harebrained thing that we are doing.” However, Ravi Kant, president of Shakti Vahini, a human rights NGO that is active in anti-trafficking, thinks that Khoya-Paya was a necessary step. “The government had to do something, otherwise nothing would be done."

Given that an average of over 74,000 children have gone missing each year between 2010 and 2013, and only an average of 45000 children were recovered, there is no doubt that more efforts to trace missing children are required. However, Khoya-Paya is, at best, a flawed enterprise introduced by a new government in power that will not improve the situation. At worst, it puts children and parents at risk instead of helping them. Aquinas does not see the point of setting up yet another portal to track missing children, no matter the intent. He asked, “Khoya-Paya is a good initiative, but how many times are we going to have good initiatives?”