Darpan to rope in childcare homes

For parents of missing children nightmares never end till they are reunited. Ditto for anyone who has lost a loved one. The wait is unspeakably agonizing. Their frantic efforts gone futile, the desperate kin reaches out to cops – all hopes pinned on the latter's help. Telangana cops have been zealously making use of a unique technology since 2017 to trace missing persons through facial recognition through their app 'Darpan.' True to its name, its results hold a mirror to the joys of united families.

Explaining about the app, Swati Lakra, Telangana Additional DGP (Women's Safety), recounts the case of a 13-year-old autistic boy (hearing and speech impaired) who went missing from Uttar Pradesh since 2015. He was traced at a child home in Assam after 5 years by Telangana police with the help of Darpan. He went missing on July 14, 2015 and was found a week later in Assam's Goalpara. He was taken to a child welfare home in the district, where he remained until recently and he was reunited with his parents after they found out where he was. During pandemic, 4 to 5 cases were tracked. "Through Darpan we have been able to trace or restore nearly 35 children across the country with their parents. There have been cases where without this kind of technology a child would not have been found," says the senior official.

Now, in their efforts to widen the use of Darpan app, cops are roping in child care institutions. Any lost person or child admitted by individuals or organizations at such care homes now have a better chance of getting back to their homes. Cops will ask the homes to upload photographs of those who cannot give details about themselves on the app, cops will match them with the database in in the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems (CCTNS) database. The tool, of course, also helps cops in nation-wide search for the absconding criminals. The software has digital image processing and identifies up to 80 nodal points on the human face and can match different data which are present in the software.

"Our teams collect data of all the missing children through FIR and capture data of missing children from CCTN. Subsequently, we track the missing children from the portal of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). Simultaneously, we also put up the data of all the found children or traced children. We take the data of children from childcare institutions across the state. The tool runs through that data and it has a unique feature that uses multiple images from one source to seek a match with any in the database nationally available. During the Operation Muskaan and Smile, all the police personnel were given this tool. They have been using this to keep adding more and more data so we can trace the children and help in happy re-unions," says the official.