Thane police’s Child Protection Unit yet to get in action

The infrastructure of the highly specialised unit, meanwhile, still remains inadequate, say officials.

The unit was designed based on suggestions of Child Welfare Committee and was supposed to have over two dozen police personnel, besides staff to liason with experts from psychiatry and psychology on case-to-case basis.

Launched on July 17, the unit is still to take up its first case.

After the inauguration, the unit located near the Thane Police Commissionerate remained closed for over a month. The first batch of office personnel, meanwhile, remain just data entry operators.

“The announcement was done hastily. The idea was to first collate the case details with all the circumstances surrounding the case,” said a senior official from CPU.

The first batch of police personnel also have four women officers, whose job will include handling cases of missing minor female victims. “For now, we are just collating cases from all police stations and have not begun detection. There are are no landline phones with us or internet connectivity in the office,” said a senior police officer from CPU.

The CPU, for now, is restricting its search to cases of missing children in the last five years from the jurisdiction of 33 police stations in the Thane Commissionerate. “We have received details from Ambernath, Badlapur, Dombivali, and Kalwa police stations for now. We are yet to get details from Mumbra police station, which has the maximum missing or kidnapping cases,” said Naval Highlinge, police sub-inspector from CPU.

Police Commissioner of Thane Vijay Kamble refused to comment on the delay and non-availability of infrastructure.

Missing or kidnapped children is one of the major crimes the police face.

While the Thane police were the first to announce a special unit to deal with the crime, Mumbai and New Mumbai police do not have such a unit.

santoshee.mishra@expressindia.com