China has launched the first public lost child alert system on June 1, Monday, in Nanjing city in east Jiangsu Province.
The new alert system was installed and tested at the Deji Plaza, a busy commercial zone in Nanjing City.
With the alert system, parents who lost their child or whose child got lost in the building can push the emergency button installed at the elevator on every floor.
The staff of the plaza will then ask the parents about the physical features and other details of the lost child and then conduct a 10-minute search within the premises. During this period, security guards will shut down and monitor all the exits in the building.
If not found within 10 minutes, the nearest police station will be alerted and will carry on the search.
Further, before the alert system was installed, security guards and staff members of the plaza have already been trained to search for missing children.
The new alert system was first tested on May 29 and within six minutes after the emergency alarm was set off, the child was found in the plaza.
In Canada and the United States, the missing child safety program, called "Code Adam," is being widely used.
Chen Shiqu, an officer of the Ministry of Public Security, said that the lost child alert system can be replicated as an effective mechanism to find missing children in other large public venues.
Around 200,000 children are lost every year in China, with most of the cases happening in public places.