Police struggle to find home for run-away boy

Police struggle to find home for run-away boy

Mangalore Today News Network

Mangalore, Feb 6: The police department acutely felt the lack of a Child Welfare Committee (CWC) in Mangalore recently, when the Mangalore South police found a 10-year-old boy from Belgaum wandering in the premises of Mangalore Central Railway Station. 

The police kept the boy in the station because Mangalore no longer has a CWC. The Department of Women and Child Welfare had dissolved the Mangalore CWC a few months back; and a new one has not yet been formed. Nina Nayak, the chairperson of the Karnataka Commission for Protection of Child Rights, said that, according to the law, the police ought to have turned over the child to a CWC or any government-run child reception centre. 

The Belgaum police succeeded in tracing the child’s father only to find out that he had no right to keep the boy, who had run away from a Belgaum-based child care centre a month back. Anand, the president of the Belgaum CWC, which had placed the child in the child care center, said that the boy did not desire to live with his abusive father. 

The police then took the child to an observation home in Bondel. But, the superintendent of the home refused to keep him because he had not committed any offence. The police were also unsuccessful in placing the boy at a child care home in Nittur, Udupi. 

They have now placed him at a home for children in Kalyanpur.