It’s been 13 days since the first year Indian School of Mines (ISM) Dhanbad student, Anurag Jagtap (18), went missing. With police failing to locate his whereabouts so far, Jagtap’s friends have taken it to social media to raise awareness about his disappearance.
ISM Dhanbad students have been constantly tweeting and writing on social media about disappearance of Anurag. “The college authorities are not making sincere efforts to find our missing friend. They have the appropriate sources to get things done but haven’t used them to speed up the investigation. They haven’t coordinated with the police authorities to locate Anurag,” said a friend of Anurag who did not wish to be named. Prof Chandan Bhar, Dean of Student Welfare at ISM, told PaGalGuY, “We were informed about this situation when Anurag’s mother called us asking for help. Before the institute could file a missing report, she had already filed one.”
Following the alleged sluggish investigations (read here), helpless students have taken the onus onto themselves to find Anurag. “Realising the power of social media, we are making efforts to spread the word on Twitter and Facebook. We started the “#FindAnurag” trend on Twitter to give a direction to our efforts. Soon after, many college students joined in to show support and made it a popular trending topic on Twitter,” said Ishu Ratna, a close friend of Anurag. “Smriti Irani was spontaneous in replying to our tweets. She gave us an assurance that investigations have been pushed by alerting the police stations from Howrah to Pune. We also got an immediate response (see picture) from the Ministry of Railways after we tweeted to Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu,” he added.
“By attributing “#FindAnurag” to every trending topic, we are making efforts to ensure that maximum number of people read it on Twitter. Various ‘Anurag missing’ posts are being shared on Facebook. Pages with huge following on facebook have been contacted to spread the word about Anurag’s disappearance, but to no avail,” said Varun Pandey, another student from ISM Dhanbad.
A close friend of Anurag appreciated the efforts of PaGaLGuY team when he came to know that we are bringing the issue to light. He said, “The first and the only media coverage we have got so far is from PaGaLGuY. We hope awareness about Anurag’s disappearance will put pressure on the police officials to speed up the investigations. Only proper media coverage will force the college authorities and police to look into the matter. We urge more people to join our online campaign to find our missing friend.”
The students at ISM Dhanbad are having college vacations till January 4. Once the lectures resume, the students plan to hold a candle march protest to put pressure on the officials to find Anurag.