AGRA: 'Bored' with online classes and angry after being scolded by parents, an 11-year-old girl and her nine-year-old brother ran away from their home in Mathura at midnight and managed to hitchhike to Delhi’s Bawana where their journey was cut short by a travel agent who spotted the children alone and informed their parents.
The duo were cousins and had plans to go to a residential school for underprivileged children in Uttarakhand's es31Rishikesh where “they would not have to pay fees”. On Friday night, they packed some clothes and shoes and sneaked out of their home at 1.30am when the family was sleeping. The children walked about 10 km to reach Yamuna expressway from where they boarded a bus to Delhi.
“Around 6am they were dropped off at Jewar toll plaza as they didn’t have any money but they hitchhiked to a bus depot in Bawana. A travel agent found them inquiring about buses to Rishikesh. He asked them for their parents’ contact information and then alerted them,” in charge of Kolahar chowki in Mathura, sub inspector Arun Tevatiya, told TOI.
Back home, the parents had noticed that the children were missing when they woke up at 4.30am. An FIR was lodged at Kolahar chowki under section 363 (kidnapping) and police started scanning CCTV footage of the area around the house, said Mathura SP (rural) Shireesh Chandra. “We found the children walking towards the highway in the CCTV footage,” he said.
Both set of parents were already at the police station when they got a call from an unknown number that their children were in a bus depot in Bawana. A team of Delhi police was informed and they took the children into custody.
The children were later handed over to their parents. “The kids told us that they were getting bored and cranky with online classes. They were also scolded at home, so they decided to study in a residential school,” said Chandra.
The parents, who run two degree colleges in Vrindavan, are now being counselled on how to identify signs of stress in kids during lockdown. The father of the girl told TOI, "We are incredibly lucky that nothing untoward happened to our children. The 12 hours that they were missing were the longest of our lives."
