Centre contests Pawan Kalyan’s claims on missing women 

New Delhi: In what appears to be an embarrassing moment for the Jana Sena Party leader Pawan Kalyan, the YSRCP government traced almost all the missing women in Andhra Pradesh, Ministry of Home Affairs said on Wednesday. 

Union minister of state for home affairs Bandi Sanjay Kumar told Lok Sabha that out of the 44,685 women including girls who went missing between 2019 and 2023, the then state government successfully traced 44,022 missing persons. 

Bandi Sanjay was responding to a question raised by the TDP MP Lavu Srikrishnadevarayalu and BK Pardhasaradhi. The junior minister said the Central government has been providing required support to the state governments in tracing and tracking the missing persons in the country. 

Sharing more details, Bandi Sanjay said Andhra Pradesh government traced 6,583 women including girls out of the 6,896 missing persons reported during 2019. He added that nearly 7,189 women out of 7,576 in 2020, 9,616 against 10,085 missing women in 2021, about 10,994 (including those went missing in the previous years) out of 10,433 in 202 and about 9,640 women out of 9,695 in 2023 were successfully tracked and traced by the police department of the state. 

Last July, the Jana Sena leader Pawan Kalyan had alleged that the Andhra Pradesh government’s village volunteer system is being used to facilitate human trafficking of single women in the state. He had claimed that, “according to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, around 29,000 to 30,000 women had gone missing and only 14,000 of them were traced. Where are the remaining 17,000 to 18,000 missing women?” Later, it turned out that the cited figures did not match with the state or national data on missing persons. 

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