A report published by India’s Union Home Ministry last week revealed that over a million women and girls disappeared between 2019 and 2021. 250,000 of the disappearances involved girls under the age of 18.
Roughly 80,000 of the women went missing in the national capital of New Delhi.
India’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), which provided data for the report to parliament, blamed “forced marriage, domestic work, sexual exploitation, and child labor” plus “mental illness, miscommunication, misadventure, domestic violence, and being victim of a crime” as the main reasons for the huge number of missing women.
The NCRB said many of the women victimized by crime and abuse are killed by the perpetrators. Others commit suicide, but their families are reluctant to report the details to law enforcement agencies. Some of the missing women are thought to have been trafficked out of the country.
The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday quoted women’s rights activist Kavita Krishnan blaming the Indian government for not doing enough to “address the large-scale network of trafficking.”
“It is a chronic problem. There has never been a policy on the issue of disappearances,” Krishnan said.
The Press Trust of India (PTI) noted that tougher laws against sexual offenses were passed in 2013 and 2018, including a law prescribing the death penalty for raping girls below 12 years of age.
These reforms also stipulated swifter investigations and trials for rape complaints and established an “Emergency Response Support System” with a special 911-style hotline phone number. A website for reporting obscene Internet content and a national database of sex offenders were added in 2018.
None of those measures seems to have helped the astonishing number of women who vanished from 2019 to 2021. The Home Ministry’s report suggested local officials have not done enough to support national initiatives to protect women.
“It is the responsibility of respective state governments to maintain law and order, including investigation and prosecution of crimes against women,” the ministry said.
The Hindustan Times reported the Union Home Ministry’s comprehensive report was prompted by a complaint from actor and Jana Sena Party (JSP) president Pawan Kalyan last month. Kalyan said at least 30,000 women and girls have been abducted by human traffickers over the past few years in the state of Andhra Pradesh, where JSP is based.
According to Kalyan, village officials in the state have been passing information about single, destitute, and widowed women to “anti-social elements,” who are “making use of this information to target women and traffic or trap them.”
“Why are our girls and women missing? What’s happening to them? Who will take responsibility?” Kalyan asked on social media.
Officials from the majority BJP party agreed the disappearances in Andhra Pradesh were troubling.
“The statistics released by the central government on missing women shows that the safety of women in the state is in danger,” said a BJP spokeswoman.
Andhra Pradesh village volunteers, on the other hand, were outraged by Kalyan’s allegations.
“What’s the evidence for your comments, which can cause fear about women’s safety in society? Your remarks violate the dignity of single women. What are the figures that the Union government provided you regarding women handed over through village volunteers to anti-social forces?” senior provincial official Vasireddy Padama responded to Kalyan, challenging him to produce proof of his accusations within 10 days.
Local police soon afterward opened a criminal case against Kalyan for “making wild accusations.” The Union Home Ministry report would seem to confirm that a shocking number of women have been vanishing under murky circumstances.
Another hot zone for disappearing women is the turbulent Jammu and Kashmir region, which lies along a disputed border with Pakistan. According to the Union Home Ministry, 9,765 women went missing from the area between 2019 and 2021. 1,148 of them were girls below the age of 18.
Police in Telangana state responded to the report by insisting they have tracked down 87 percent of the girls and women listed as missing, and most of them “were not linked to any serious criminal activities such as trafficking for sexual exploitation, child labor, bonded labor, begging and child marriage.”
The Deccan Herald noted Telegana’s purported clearance rate of 87 percent for disappearing women was much higher than the national average of only 62 percent.