Click to play videoNoida: Delhi’s satellite township Noida has become the destination next in the National Capital Region with a rapid infrastructure growth and proximity to the Capital.
And with the Commonwealth Games just around the corner, the city is likely to go big on the tourism map as well.
But the sensational kidnapping of Adobe India CEO Naresh Gupta’s son Anant from his affluent neighbourhood here has also brought into sharp focus the spiraling crime graph in the region.
Three-year-old Anant may have been back home courtesy the high-profile nature of the kidnapping and the intense media glare, but just five-and-a half kilometers away from the Gupta household a village is wrapped in gloom.
Nithari village, close to the posh sector 31 locality of Noida, is grieving for the loss of more than a dozen children who went missing months ago and there is still no news about them.
Villagers claim 38 children aged between three and 12 years have gone missing from this village since February 2006 and the police aren’t doing much to find them.
"Anant was a rich boy so the entire police force and the STF tried to rescue him. Thirty-eight Anants are missing here, but we are poor and so the police is not interested,” says a parent of a missing child, Ram Kishan.
Most of the children went missing from one stretch of the road in Nithari and since then no ransom call has been received.
While police say the children may have walked out on their own, but it’s an argument no one is willing to buy.
"Had they gone out on their own, they wouldn’t have gone far because most of us started looking within half-an-hour,” says another parent Ashok Kumar.
The residents of Nithari have lost faith in the Noida police and their grief seems to be caught in a political blame game
"It’s a shame on the state government that so many kids are missing for months and they are unable to do anything,” says Minister of State for Home Sri Prakash Jaiswal.
The police have now sent special teams all over the country to solve the mystery of the missing children of Nithari, a move widely seen as a fallout of the Anant case.
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