The other day, Jana Sena Party president and power star Pawan Kalyan made a sensational statement that a record number of girls and women are missing in Andhra Pradesh and their whereabouts of many of them are still not known.
Quoting his sources in National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Pawan Kalyan said more than 30,000 women were missing in Andhra Pradesh but the state police had miserably failed to trace the missing women and girls.
What is worse, he attributed the missing cases to village/ward volunteers who, he alleged, were passing on information to anti-social elements about single women and others who do not have proper protection, thereby abetting human trafficking.
The Jagan government and the YSR Congress party leaders have given strong rebuttal to Pawan and the government even sought to prosecute him for his baseless allegations against volunteers.
However, the Central government on Wednesday disclosed in Parliament that there were indeed huge number of cases of missing women in Andhra Pradesh. But it is a nation-wide phenomenon and not confined to only AP.
According to the statement made by Union minister of state for home affairs Ajay Kumar Mishra in Rajya Sabha, as many as 22,278 women and 7,928 girls had gone missing in Andhra Pradesh in a span of three years between 2019 and 2021.
The number of women and girls who had gone missing was 6252 and 2186 respectively in 2019; 7057 and 2374 in 2020; and 8969 and 3358 on 2021. However, the central report did not mention how many of them had been traced and handed over to their relatives.
What is more interesting is that the number of missing women and girls is more in Telangana, compared to Andhra Pradesh. In all, a huge number of 34,495 women and 8066 girls had gone missing between 2019 and 2021.
In fact, the number of missing women and girls is abnormally high in many other states like Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Odisha and Rajasthan, when compared to the Telugu states.
While Pawan Kalyan might be right in saying that more than 30,000 women were missing in AP since 2019, his allegation that the village and ward volunteers were behind these missing women has no merit.
There are no volunteers’ system in Telangana; and for that matter in other states like Maharashtra, MP, West Bengal, Odisha and Rajasthan, where the number of missing women is too high, compared to Andhra Pradesh.
So, who are responsible for the missing of women in these states, Mr Pawan?