Click to play videoNew Delhi: It has been three years since the gruesome Nithari killings shook the nation.
The complaints of poor families were repeatedly ignored until it was too late but the killings have failed to address the concern of other missing children in the National Capital Region.
On December 29, 2006, the remains of 19 women and children were pulled out of a drain in Nithari in Noida, a bustling satellite town near Delhi.
Some of those children had been missing since 2003 but the cases were not registered. Three years later, little has changed.
Sonu left home in a fit of anger five years ago but fell right into the hands of the child labour mafia at the New Delhi Railway Station. The 17-year-old was picked up by a man and taken to Meerut by train with the promise of a good job.
"I told him I wanted to go home. He said who ever comes here never goes home," says a homeless child Sonu.
Instead he was forced to work in a factory along with other children.
"All the children were made to work long hours. If I used to sleep while working then he would beat me up with a metallic strip," adds Sonu.
It took Sonu's parents three months to file a missing persons report and five years for an NGO to rescue Sonu.
But there are hundreds of missing children still waiting to be found.
According to the state police, nearly 2,000 children went missing from the National Capital Region in 2009 out of which 1,219 were from Delhi, 132 from Ghaziabad and the rest from Noida, Gurgaon and Faridabad put together.
But former police officials admit the real figures would be much higher.
"Registering a case means more workload, means the police will have to investigate the entire case. That is why police don't want to take it on and lots of times they don't think it's important," says Amod Kanth, former director general of Police, Arunachal Pradesh, and Chairman Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights (DCPCR).
But activists say the problem is far more serious.
The majority are being trafficked for forced labour. If they are girls they are sold and forced into the sex trade," claims founder member of Bachpan Bachao Andolan Bhuvan Vibhu.
A Delhi High Court directive in March 2009 asking missing children reports to be mandatory made into FIR's did put the pressure on Delhi Police as 950 cases were registered in one month alone.
But for every child who is still missing the love of his family, the innocence of childhood and freedom is still a far cry away.
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