In the year 1988, S Krishnan’s brother S Venkatesh went missing while they were playing hide and seek. Even after 28 years, Krishnan, who is now based in the US, is still hopeful about finding his brother.
He recently came across an office in Adyar in Chennai where he found a team of techies led by Mr. Vijay Gnanadesikan who had a database on missing children. They were using facial recognition as the method to track them.
“It has been a year now. The team has been digging out content for the database from the state and central government websites and social media. Their database has identities of three lakh missing children,” a source said.
If a photo is put up for search, the software tracks down similar identities through database, said Vijay who gave an example of a four-year-old beggar from Allahabad he came across on Facebook and it matched with the picture of a boy whose parents were from Haryana.
“Facetagr, a closed application, has helped in finding more than 100 missing children across the country. Talks are on between the team and the anti-child trafficking unit in Tamil Nadu to incorporate their tracking system,” the source added.
Vijay added that despite the Centre launching the ‘Khoya Paya’ (Lost found) website for the public, sifting through lakhs of photos is a difficult task. Further, the spelling of their names may vary. Sometimes the family does not have the photo of the lost child. In such cases, they can give the picture of a sibling for tracking down.
As many as 15,000 kids from Nepal were rescued while being trafficked into India. The team is involved in finding their families. They have handed out 15 handsets with the app to the volunteers who are involved in the project.
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