Uttar Pradesh:- Nearly 63 months after he went missing from his home in Uttar Pradesh, 13-year-old Shom reunited with his mother, nearly 1,250 km away in Assam. It was an emotional scene, a Guwahati-based NGO working with special children when Shom Soni met his mother Rita for the first time since July 13, 2015 – the day he went missing from Handia, around 35 km from Prayagraj in UP.
“We had been searching for Shom since the day he went missing. Though we never lost hope, with each passing day it seemed impossible we would find him. It’s a miracle he was found after so long and so far away,” said Rita. The emotional mother hugged her son, who is severely autistic and suffers from bouts of epilepsy, and cried with joy after years of separation and desperation. Shom was playing outside our home in the morning on the day he disappeared. They don’t know how he ended up in Assam. The past five years, they have searched almost all parts of UP and Bihar looking for him. Shom appears to have boarded a train and reached Bongaigaon in Assam where child welfare department officials found him and handed him over to Destination. Later he was brought to the organization’s Guwahati office. The child wasn’t able to recollect many details about his family. But he knew his name and the school where he was studying.
Despite months and years passing, like Shom’s family Hazarika too didn’t give up the search to trace his home. Since Hazarika is also a member of the Assam State Commission for Protection of Child Rights (ASCPCR), she reached out to the child welfare board in Uttar Pradesh last year.
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