With the start of the second phase of Operation Mukti, police department with stake holders including Child Welfare Committee and various voluntary organisations conducted a meeting to draft plan of action for different awareness programmes to be held during the next 15 days. Parallel with the awareness programmes, all four anti-human trafficking units will also contact the children they have identified and their parents, to ensure that they are not going back on the streets to beg.

Police have identified 292 children under Operation Mukti. Out of these, 119 were found to be only begging, 53 were non-school going and begging, 59 were working as rag pickers, 44 were found selling balloons or doing some other petty task, three were found in intoxicated condition, 171 children had poor state of living and 126 were from other states.

Dehradun Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Nivedita Kukreti said, “We are cross checking the data which we have collected and the data that was available to the stake holders to ascertain whether any child has returned to begging. Another thing is awareness campaigns through street plays, one to one door meeting with the parents, through pamphlets and through movies. We are trying to target both, those who are asking for money and those are giving it. We want to give a message to the people that encouraging begging is wrong, they should not be paying them.”

She further added, “Third thing which we will try to do is link these kids with sponsored schemes. Also, if during the process we find parents who are already beneficiaries of a government sponsored scheme but the child is not going to school or the child is begging, then an FIR will be filed against such parents.”

When asked about the DNA testing that planned in suspicious cases she said, “So far there is no such suspicious case but we are simultaneously carrying on the documentation process of any new kid found involved in begging.”