In January 2026, two young sisters went missing from Ranchi, Jharkhand, triggering an urgent search. With limited leads and vast geographies to cover, Ranchi Police sought support from Just Rights for Children's Raksha AI tools. Drawing on years of child protection data, trafficking patterns, migration trends, GIS mapping and machine learning, Raksha AI responds to the critical question If the children had been trafficked, where were they most likely to be found? The tool identified a high-risk trafficking corridor spanning Lohardaga, Khunti and Gumla. Despite massive manhunt, the girls were not in these hotspot districts. It appeared that the prediction had failed.
The tech experts of Raksha ai urged
“The model is not predicting a single village or building It is identifying the most likely operational geography. Continue searching within the surrounding radius.”
The police expanded their efforts to nearby locations within the same movement corridor highlighted by the analysis. Then came the breakthrough. On 14 January 2026, the two sisters were safely rescued from the Chitarpur area of Ramgarh district, Jharkhand, within the radius identified by Raksha AI. The information generated through technology aided search and rescue operation, further led to the rescue of another 52 missing and kidnapped children, the arrest of 21 traffickers/kidnappers, and the dismantling an organised crime network. This technology aided police and civil society intervention demonstrates how technology, data and partnerships can make child protection systems smarter, faster and more effective. Technology is the amplifier in timely interventions to prevent crimes against children and ensure their protection.
However, more often than we would like, we are only able to reach the child after harm has occurred. According to the Crime in India 2024 report by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), the crimes against children increased by 5.85 percent in 2024 compared to the previous year. Today, the real and the virtual world are intertwined in unprecedented ways. Criminal networks operate across states and countries, online platforms create new avenues for exploitation, and millions of data points are generated every day.
Yet much of this information remains fragmented across departments, institutions, and jurisdictions, limiting its potential to inform swift response. Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Material (CSEAM) is being created, shared, and circulated at unprecedented speed across online platforms, encrypted channels, and digital networks. AI-generated deepfakes and synthetic CSEAM, sometimes based on images of real children, compound real harms at scale. Meanwhile, offenders increasingly use technology to operate across jurisdictions and conceal their identities in ways unimaginable a decade ago. Artificial intelligence presents a paradox, a pandora's box of boons and harms. The same technology misused by offenders can also help protect children by enabling prevention rather than merely improving response mechanisms. At its best, AI can uncover trafficking routes by analysing historical data and movement patterns, identify emerging and dominant hotspots of child labour, child marriage, and exploitation. It can monitor online environments for indicators of child sexual abuse and can predict vulnerabilities and risks before they escalate into crimes. This reality makes it imperative that AI be developed and deployed responsibly, with child rights, safety, transparency, and accountability at its core.
From Reaction to Prevention
The global child protection ecosystem has traditionally been structured around rescue, rehabilitation, and justice. Every rescue represents a child who has already suffered. Prevention, the most important pillar of all, remains least developed. The future of child protection must therefore move beyond reactive interventions toward prevention-by-design systems, from fragmented data to integrated intelligence, and from human intuition alone to evidence-based, predictive action.
Raksha: AI for Prevention by Design
Raksha means “protection”, and that is exactly what it delivers. By combining ground data, geospatial intelligence, and AI, Raksha AI shifts child protection from reaction to prevention, ensuring timely action so no child is left behind. Raksha is part of this AI for social good applications repository, which Just Rights for Children brings to the world for child safety and prosperity. The prototype was unveiled at Prosperity Futures: Child Safety Tech Summit, the official pre-summit event of the AI Impact Summit 2026, Raksha AI marks the first-ever deployment of an integrated AI system designed not merely to respond to harm after it occurs, but to predict, pre-empt, and prevent child trafficking, child marriage, and online child sexual exploitation and abuse.
It embodies protection, trust, and care for children and reflects India's enduring commitment to safeguarding children and promoting a childhood that is safe, free, and full of opportunity. At the same time, it strengthens the child protection ecosystem using geospatial intelligence, AI-powered insights, and integrated protection systems. Raksha AI is part of the AI for social good applications repository, which Just Rights for Children brings to the world for child safety and prosperity. At its core, Raksha operates through three focused AI tools: The first acts on prevention by addressing economic vulnerability at scale, particularly to prevent child marriage before it occurs. The second targets the organised crime of trafficking by pre-empting it and following high-movement corridors, financial trails to identify and dismantle criminal networks. The third strengthens digital child protection by detecting, analysing, and mapping online heat zones and IP addresses associated with the creation, circulation, and consumption of CSEAM.
The question we are now asking is “how effectively we can prevent that crime from happening in the first place?”, instead of asking “how quickly we can respond after a crime occurs?” This shift towards prevention from reaction, and for convergence from fragmentation, will redefine the future of child protection. As nations grapple with increasingly complex threats to children's safety, India has a unique opportunity to demonstrate how ethical, rights-based artificial intelligence can be used to protect the most vulnerable.
Raksha is not merely a technological innovation; it is an invitation to reimagine child protection itself. By combining human commitment with technological capability, we can move closer to a future where fewer children need rescuing because fewer children are ever placed at risk.
About the Author: Priyanka Ribhu is the General Secretary, Association for Voluntary Action.
