An 11-year-old boy who ran away from home was reunited with his Gujarati family, thanks to the agile and benevolent Mumbai police.An 11-year-old boy who ran away from home was reunited with his Gujarati family, thanks to the agile and benevolent Mumbai police.
In a rare gesture, the police personnel at Andheri’s DN Nagar police station not only located the family but also gathered funds such that the boy’s parents could arrive in the city and take him home in Mundra, Gujarat, a national daily reported.
The police approached a local NGO for funds when the body’s parents expressed their inability to travel to Mumbai owing to financial constraints.
At roughly 2 am on July 25, police inspector Wahid Pathan, on patrolling duty, saw a famished boy who claimed he was homeless. Pathan, instead of abandoning the boy, took him to the police station.
“We needed to rule out the possibility of any untoward incident with the boy. At the station, he was first fed, and the women officers started talking to him. Though he confessed to having run away from home on July 21, he couldn’t recall his address,” Shashikant Mane, assistant commissioner of police for DN Nagar division, was quoted as saying by the daily.
It emerged that the boy wanted to drop out of school but his parents didn’t relent, which made him consider this extreme step. His family later disclosed that the boy made similar attempts to run away from home in the past.
While he couldn’t reveal much information about his family, he said they lived in Gandhidham.
The police contacted the Mundra police station. “We learnt that the family was looking for the boy but had not approached the local police to report him missing. We made a video call to assure them that the child was safe with us,” a police officer told the daily.
The child panicked thinking he would be jailed or sent to a boarding school. The women officers and the child welfare committee., however, counselled him and allayed his fear. The boy left for home on Thursday.
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