Opinion | Can AI Help Find India's Missing Children?

A few weeks ago, Sahid S.K., an AI artist and creator based in Arambag, West Bengal, teamed up with the Rajasthan police to help find missing children. Sahid is also the co-founder of Megalodon, a creative agency.

When the cops from Rajasthan approached him about recreating the old, worn-out photos of the missing children, the opportunity to make AI work for people was clear. Using AI tools, the images of the kids could be recreated, imagining how they would look today, helping people identify them years after they went missing. "I was given old, faded pictures where you could barely see the children's faces. I reconstructed their faces using AI tools and age-progression technology to estimate their current appearance. It was challenging, but knowing that this could help reunite families was all the motivation I needed," Sahid said in a LinkedIn post.

Every hour, six children go missing in India. According to the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB), over 2,000 girls go missing every day in the country. From around 66,000 missing girls in 2018, over 85,000 girls went missing in the year 2022.

And these are just the reported numbers. Organisations working in the field estimate that millions go missing every year.

Children At Risk

I travel primarily on trains, and in addition to the usual pictures of rivers, tracks, and hills, the most common imagery is children loitering around different platforms. According to Railway Children India, every five minutes, a child arrives alone at a railway platform in the country. These kids become the target of drug peddlers, traffickers, and other predators. Over the past decade, Railway Children claims it has reunited 22,740 children with their families.

I am sure the reunion stories are fulfilling and deeply moving. For each family, this reunion means the world. But I also wonder if AI can be leveraged even deeper and at a larger scale to create a more significant impact.

Isn't that what a disruptive new technology is expected to do - change the game exponentially?

AI Fighting Crime

Earlier this year, in January, Delhi police used AI tools to not just identify a dead victim's body but also find his killer. As reported by NDTV's Mukesh Singh Sengar, on January 10, the body of a young man was found near the Geeta Colony flyover in east Delhi. His face was beyond recognition, so the cops reconstructed his image using AI and printed over 500 posters circulated across the locality. A man came forward, recognising Hitendra, giving clues for further investigation, and finally nabbing the culprits.

The intersection of AI and crime is mostly scary. But in a very tiny way, it also promises to solve crimes, not just enable them. As I wrote earlier this year in my column, AI To Solve A Murder - Future Of Crime Fighting, sometimes, AI surprises us in good ways.

While these are early examples of how simple AI tools can be used to find missing children, they are not enough to move the needle at a national scale.

This is perhaps a great opportunity to train an AI model with all the missing children's data and make it work to solve the problem. In fact, there are examples from across the world of countries like the U.S., Canada, and Japan using AI at a national level.

In a recent Fast Company article, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) shared how they use AI to locate missing children faster. With over 22,000 cases of missing children reported yearly in the U.S., the NCMEC now uses AI tools to streamline the investigation process.

One such tool, Logikcull, helps sift through mountains of documents and data to find crucial information for building legal cases against child abductors or abusers. This technology has already saved NCMEC more than 4,000 hours of document review, freeing up their small legal and imaging teams to focus on reuniting families and helping children. As Gavin Portnoy, VP at NCMEC, highlights, AI tools allow the organisation to cut through the overwhelming volume of reports and use their limited resources more effectively to help those in need.

From Fear To Hope

Over the past few years, the paranoia around AI surveillance, job disruption, and warfare has hogged the headlines. For people and society at large to realise that AI can be both dark and illuminating, we need the most positive use cases. Solving India's missing children problem is clearly right up there, asking for the top AI researchers to shed their lab coats and jump right into solving this at a population scale.

If you know of people and organisations with the tools, empathy, and heart to help India's missing children reunite with their families, please send me a message.

(Pankaj Mishra is the AI Editor at NDTV. He shapes stories and conversations that help explain AI in India and how it influences people's lives and work)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author