Missing children with special reference to social development

More than 400 million children below the age of 18 years reside in India, and these children and youth together, comprise of more than 55% of the country's entire population. (Chauhan, 2019) Despite of the Government's best efforts to protect and promote their welfare, children still form one of the most vulnerable groups of people, who prone to numerous kinds of dangerous situations and exploitation for various reasons. Additionally, numerous children are reported ‘missing’ each year. (National Human Rights Commission, India, 2007) Children who go missing might be runways from home, might be abducted by family or non-family members, can be trafficked for illegal reasons or can be lost due to different reasons. Various categories of missing children are representative of the diverse social problems that exist in society and as a group, are so varied, that it results in absence of adequate data or an applied set of definitions for them. Missing children is a major and growing problem which gets much less than needed attention from the Centre as well as State government bodies. In spite of the various policy commitments, the struggle against missing children has faced many obstacles. The issue of missing children warrants a much higher precedence and a stronger strategy to deal with the same. An inter-state cooperation, integrated systems and a country-wide database for missing children must be established and should work well altogether.