According to the data of the Ministry of Development of Women and Children in India, between 2012 and 2017 more than 240,000 children disappeared, this only in the cases reported, since other institutions estimate that the figure already exceeds 500,000 children lost each year.
Faced with this situation, the Indian government has been overcome, since some of these children end up staying in child care institutions.
In the absence of a department dedicated to comparing the photographs of lost children with those of those who arrive at care homes, the situation becomes more complicated and more and more children do not return with their parents.
Fortunately, technology is here to help through facial recognition systems (FRS).
An experiment that is being a success
In order to try to resolve the issue of missing children, and the worrying increase in numbers, the Ministry created a nationwide online database known as TrackChild.
Here you can see the photos of the missing and found children, as well as the police information that can be used by other agencies and even citizens.
TrackChild also serves to raise reports of missing children, and despite being a good digital tool to concentrate all this type of information in one place, the accumulation of photographs has become a problem for institutions, which have not been able to reduce the disappeared rate.
Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA), an organization dedicated to child welfare, developed a software based on FRS , which is dedicated to automatically compare the photographs of children lost in TrackChild with those of children arriving at hospitals, care homes and other institutions, in addition to which new databases can be added and thus expand their reach.
This platform was presented to the police department who agreed to start a pilot test. However, it was not easy, since the bureaucratic problems did not allow its implementation immediately, so the Superior Court of Delhi had to intervene, which ended up approving the project of the police department.
Once approved, BBA received a batch of 45,000 photographs from the TrackChild database, and in just four days managed to identify 2,930 children who were in various parts of the country. A success that nobody expected.
Despite these good figures, the authorization was only for this experimental test, so if they want to be established as another tool of the police department and TrackChild, before they have to overcome a lot of legal obstacles, since final is the management of thousands of photos of minors and their data, which would be in a database belonging to a private institution.
Institution that has not given details of the functioning of the algorithm and is not willing to give up its technology, with years of development and investment, even if it is a good cause.
A subject undoubtedly complicated.
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