The Hindu

• Child Rights Trust holds public hearing in Bangalore

Bangalore, Mar 5: Is society insensitive to the problems of parents whose children are missing? Such a doubt has arisen in the wake of some parents, who are anxiously searching for their missing children, revealing how they were fooled by pranksters and exploited by astrologers.

Participating in a public hearing on “missing children” organised by a non-government organisation, Child Rights Trust (CRT), in Bangalore on Tuesday, an elderly couple, Nagaraj and Saraswathi, narrated their woes.

Nine-year wait

70-year-old Nagaraj and his wife have plunged into depression as their only son is yet to be traced nine years after going away from their home. Their 18-year-old son Lohitashwa (now he is 27 years old) left home in 1999 upset over a minor argument with his parents on where the TV should be kept in the house.

The elderly parents, who issued media advertisements in this regard appealing to people to inform them if they saw their son, were in for a shock as they started receiving calls from pranksters. The pranksters played joke on them by making false claims that their son is with them. Another caller even threatened the parents. He claimed that their son was with him and said he would break his legs. Mr. Nagaraj realised that he was a prankster as the caller gave the telephone number of a police station when asked for his contact number.

Prank calls

A senior executive in an multi-national company, Murulikrishna whose 14-year-old son is missing for the last four monthssaid that he started receiving calls from pranksters about the location of his son.

One caller said that his son is near Mysore Palace. But the enquiries revealed that it is false. Some other caller said he is near Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh. But even that was false.

“We have been receiving such calls,” he said.

Syed Aslam and his wife, Nagima, were in trouble as their eight-year-old son had gone missing while offering prayers at a mosque in Bangalore in July 2007.

The couple was fortunate as they could trace him six months later. Nagimaalleged that astrologers had collected nearly Rs 50,000 from them. Syed, who works as a tailor, mortgaged his property to raise funds to pay the astrologers. After collecting the money, the astrologers told them that their son is dead and the search for him would be a futile exercise.

CRT Executive Director Vasudeva Sharma said the purpose of holding a public hearing was to bring the problems related to tracing of missing children to the notice of the Government and society.