LUCKNOW, April 2 -- Within hours of 17-year-old Nayan vanishing on December 22, 2025, her body was recovered near railway tracks in Lucknow. Within three days, it was cremated. Yet for 99 days, her mother Geeta Kumari searched while police stations passed the file between them, failing to match a missing girl with an unidentified body found the same night, just a kilometre away. The high court took one intervention to connect what local police could not.

The teenager was found to have died the night she went missing, barely one kilometre from her home in Saumya Vihar Colony under Talkatora police station limits. Her body was recovered near railway tracks in the adjoining Para police station area, filed as unidentified, then cremated as a...