How Department of Posts helped missing woman reunite with family
A woman who went missing three years ago from a remote area in Bihar's Madhubani was reunited with her family, thanks to the Department of Posts (DoP). After she vanished, her family lodged a missing complaint and tried to trace her, but in vain. While the family thought they would never see her again, here's how the DoP brought the missing woman back home.
A TBI article by Trina Chakrabarti, CRY (Child Rights and You) Regional Director (East), shows how DoP and CRY played a major role in the family reunion. In April, a postman of Gramin Dak Sevak (DoP's village-level tier) approached the woman's brother, Kameshwarji, with a faded photo of a woman living in an Agra mental asylum. He soon recognized it was his missing sister.
Kameshwarji then contacted a person from Agra who confirmed about his sister and her young son, who was in a government-run children's home in the same city. Kameshwarji soon realized how DoP was the "unlikely hero" in the reunion.
After the woman went missing, Gautam Budhnagar Police found her; she was pregnant, didn't seem stable, and couldn't recollect anything. That's when they took her to the Agra asylum; she later gave birth to a boy. Notably, DoP could solve the case even though it only received information about a woman living in an asylum for over two years from an Agra-based CRY partner.
Naresh Paras, Coordinator of Mehfuz Surakshit Bachpan (a CRY partner working on child protection issues), said, "During one of my routine visits to the children's home, I chanced upon a baby. Further inquiries led me to this woman, a resident of the mental asylum." "Upon knowing her background, I reached out to my contacts with the basic information and a photograph," he added.
After CRY received information about the woman's background, it forwarded the same to a Delhi-based senior Indian Postal Service official, to locate her family in Bihar. However, DoP didn't have many details, except for the district's name and her husband's name. While tracing her family using just these details was next to impossible, the postal network managed to do that in just 48 hours.
What helped the postal network trace the woman's family was the interpersonal connect shared by DoP personnel with families to the day, especially in rural areas. The interpersonal connect helped Gramin Dak Sevak find out Kameshwarji's location thanks to the members of DoP's village-tier who did the groundwork. A postman then reached Kameshwarji's house, after which the missing woman was reunited with her family.
