Unseen, Unheard: India’s Missing Girls in Madhya Pradesh

By Urvi Prakash 

Vanished Voices: Madhya Pradesh

Madhya Pradesh, often referred to as the “heart of India,” bears a disturbing scar. In the past year alone, more than 23,000 women and girls have gone missing in the state. These are not just names on paper; they are daughters who never returned from school, sisters who stepped out for work, mothers who vanished while collecting firewood.

A Disturbing Pattern

 The numbers themselves tell a chilling tale. In 2022, 9,066 girls were reported missing in Madhya Pradesh, averaging 24 disappearances every single day. Girls make up nearly threefourths of all missing children in the state. This pattern is not confined to Madhya Pradesh alone. Across India, more than 47,000 children were reported missing in 2022, and 71% of them were girls.

Other states, too, reflect similar distress: 

• West Bengal consistently records some of the highest numbers of missing children in India.
• In Karnataka, over 1,300 children remain untraced, a majority of them girls.
• In Delhi, the capital city, more than 6,600 children went missing in 2022, and only about half were traced.

Why Girls?

The disappearance of such a disproportionate number of girls is deeply gendered. Poverty, unemployment, and migration make them especially vulnerable to traffickers who lure them with promises of work or education. Many are trafficked into forced labor, child marriage, or sexual exploitation. 

The Silent Grief in Homes 

For ordinary women, this crisis deepens their vulnerability. Mothers walk their daughters to school with unease. Teenage girls quicken their pace as the evening sets in. Sisters whisper warnings: never take a lift from a stranger, never walk alone in the dark. Behind every missing girl is a family waiting by the door: a mother at the police station gate, a father scouring bus stands at midnight, a brother scrolling endlessly through photographs hoping for a clue. These struggles rarely appear in police records, but they define the silent suffering of thousands.

Systemic Indifference

A recurring complaint from families is that the police often dismiss reports of missing girls as “elopement cases,” delaying investigation in the crucial first hours. With inadequate infrastructure and poor coordination between states, tracing missing children becomes a nearimpossible task. For many families, the search stretches into years and then into silence. 

Beyond Numbers, a National Reflection 

The crisis of missing girls is not about Madhya Pradesh alone; it is about the nation’s conscience. When tens of thousands of daughters vanish from a single state, and lakhs disappear across India, what does it say about the worth of a girl’s life in this country? 

The silence around missing daughters is deafening. It is not just a law-and-order issue; it is a mirror held up to society itself. India stands at a crossroads where its daughters are disappearing into the shadows. 

When 47,000 girls can vanish from one state in three years, the question is not only where they went, but also what society has allowed itself to become