Soon, This App Will Help In Tracking And Reuniting Missing Children

On June 29, Union Commerce Minister, Suresh Prabhu and Nobel Laureate, Kailash Satyarthi launched a mobile application titled ¡®ReUnite¡¯ in New Delhi to trace down missing and abandoned children all over India.

India is home to thousands of rural villages where majority of the population lives in secluded, dark areas. Poverty, cheap labour and sex trade have been cited as the major reasons behind children going missing. According to an article in Huffpost, around 180 children go missing in India every single day, with many of them never to be found.

Photo Credit: PIB India/Twitter Handle

Satyarthi¡¯s flagship programme ¡®Bachpan Bachao Andolan¡¯ in partnership with major information and technology firm, Capgemini has launched this initiative. ¡°Missing children should not be considered as just figures as it's a tragedy for the parents whose lives are thrown off track after losing their loved ones¡±, said Satyarthi to Press Trust Of India.

He further emphasised that technology can be a boon for finding solution to social issues like these and that technology shouldn¡¯t be driven by commercial profits alone.

How Does The App Work

The app is a multi-user platform where parents and other people can put up the photographs of abandoned, missing and helpless children. The application makes use of the facial recognition technique by Amazon web services. The technique will match the children¡¯s photographs against the reports and details to track them.

In today¡¯s fast paced technological world, uploading pictures can lead to lack of privacy. However, the app significantly deals with this aspect as well, the photographs of the children will not be saved in the phone¡¯s memory. The pictures will automatically get deleted once the app is closed, leaving only algorithm equations behind.

ReUnite is a union between compassion and technology. This app is a simple tool to reunite missing children with their families. I thank Union Minister Shri @sureshpprabhu. @AshwinYardi COO of @Capgemini, Shri @hsphoolka ji and my team at @BBAIndia for this initiative pic.twitter.com/02QWRopNVa

¡ª Kailash Satyarthi (@k_satyarthi) June 29, 2018

The idea behind the app was discovered during an internal hackathon, tech challenge hosted at Capgemini to figure out solutions for missing children in India, said the Chief Operating Officer at Capgemini, Ashwin Yardi.

India has a shortage of required manpower and data techniques that would help find missing children. The arrival of facial recognition technology, if put to optimum use can prove to be a blessing in disguise for the Indian police.

According to statistics published by Qrius, Delhi police used the facial recognition technique to find nearly 3,000 missing children within four days in April 2018. Many parents in India due to abysmal poverty tend to sell their children to child traffickers. Hence, reuniting such children with their families becomes even more difficult for the concerned authorities.