Cases of runaway kids on rise in Jaipur in Covid times

JAIPUR: Helplines for children have been working non-stop to deal with issues that minors are facing due to Covid-19 situation.
The Jaipur railway child help desk officials claimed that while the number of cases in 2020-21 were fewer than previous year, they are getting more number of runaway cases.
According to officials, while there were around 350 cases of child trafficking, child labour and runaways in 2019-20, this reduced to approximately 100 incidents in 2020-21 and 10 out of 15 cases are those of runaways. These include children from lower and middle-class families.
Anup Yadav, coordinator, Jaipur railway child help desk told TOI, “The number of cases has reduced because of the lockdown as no trains were plying. For child labour and trafficking the preferred mode of transport is railways, especially trains from Bihar. However, we found that after the trains began to run again, majority of cases that we were getting were of runaway children as opposed to the previous years.”
The officials said that children gave different reasons for running away from homes. Yadav said, “When asked, the children gave variety of reasons and some of them were as trivial as the fact that they were stopped from playing outside during lockdown or were asked not to spend too much time on social media.”
These runaway children are handed over to the child welfare committee who get in touch with the families. In case there are no legal guardians, then the minors are accommodated in shelters. Meanwhile, the Rajasthan State Commission for Protection of Child Rights has also started the process of collecting data of the number of children who have been rescued from child labour in all districts in the past two years. This will also include those rescued by various organisations in the state.