Here, hope uploaded from an Indore commercial complex

Seven years ago, when an NGO, National Centre for Missing Children, launched a website missingindiankids.com, they sought details of missing children from parents and police stations and posted them on the site with photographs.

Even today, the government, despite its vast resources, does not have anything of the sort that Anuj Bhargava, a portal developer, and his wife Nidhi conceived when they stumbled upon an advertisement, “Have you seen me”, of a missing American boy on the Internet.

“I searched the Net for information on missing kids in vain. Even National Crime Bureau of Records did not have any records,” says Anuj, 44, a process engineer. Together with his wife Nidhi, an MBA, he began the free service to help parents “who die everyday when their children disappear.”

Within the first couple of months, the website started getting on an average 4,000 visitors daily from Alabama to California and from Kerala to Kolkata. In the first week of this month, the website registered more than 97,000 hits. The website now has details of over 400 missing children from all over India.

While Anuj manages the website from office, Nidhi sells handmade chocolates to raise funds. “I need to design portals and earn to keep the venture going,” Anuj says. “I was so much involved with it that I did not have time for any other job,” says Nidhi, also a post-graduate in Psychology.

A computer, an old scanner and stationery are all the couple has by way of infrastructure. The flow of donations has dried up, even the response from the police is not encouraging. Parents don’t bother to inform when the child returns home.

Several people offered to work as volunteers by pasting printouts in public places. The organisation had approached the government for funds to appoint dedicated representatives but failed to elicit any response. “Whenever we get leads, we pass them to police stations. Beyond that we have no idea for parents and police rarely get back after the child is home. They, however, get very aggressive while getting the names removed from the website. They want to wipe out the bad memories fast,” Anuj says of his experience with parents.

“We wanted to do much more but had no resources,” Nidhi says. A donation of Rs 1,000 was all that the couple got in 2006.

Very few have heard about the service even in Indore. “I haven’t heard about the service but we will definitely cooperate in every possible manner,” says Indore IG Rajendra Kumar, who took over a few months ago.

Post-Nithari, the Centre is planning a website for missing children and Anuj was in Delhi last week on an invitation from the Ministry of Women and Child Development.