Gujarat police trace 701 missing people in two-week crackdown

A woman missing for nearly 10 years was among 701 people Gujarat police traced and reunited with their families in a 14-day sweep that turned a backlog of cold files into an active statewide hunt.

Operation Milap ran from May 7 to May 21, after being launched in the first week of May 2026, and police stations across Gujarat were told to reopen, review and aggressively pursue long-pending missing-person cases. Official figures cited by police show that 24,767 people have been reported missing in Gujarat since 2007, a scale that made the two-week result stand out even before the operation closed.

The breakthrough came from a mix of old-fashioned casework and newer data tracing. Police used technical intelligence, human intelligence, old case records, digital footprints, fresh field-level verification and old evidence to track people who had vanished years earlier. Officers also revisited forgotten files and followed leads that had been left behind when the cases first went cold.

Deputy Chief Minister Harsh Sanghavi said the drive was launched under Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel’s leadership and that all necessary resources were made available to police. Additional Director General of Police Ajay Choudhary of CID Crime and Railways said the effort was producing results in cases where people had been missing for many years. The operation, he said, was not just about paperwork but about locating people who had slipped out of sight long before the current crackdown began.

Police are also using the operation to probe possible trafficking syndicates, runaway networks and criminal gangs alleged to be involved in child trafficking and baby-selling rackets. That angle makes the operation more than a welfare drive, because missing-person cases can overlap with exploitation networks that keep victims hidden and families in the dark.

The Ministry of Home Affairs has warned that trafficking victims can face physical violence, sexual abuse, harassment, threat and coercion, and has urged stronger coordination, sensitization and civil-society involvement in anti-trafficking work. In Gujarat, Operation Milap has become a test of whether that kind of coordination can produce fast results when the state actually goes back through the forgotten stack.

For the families who got answers in May, the turnaround was immediate. For the thousands still listed as missing since 2007, the question now is whether the same methods can keep turning old paperwork into live rescues before the files go cold again.