Despite demand, adoptions dip steadily
Flaws in system and mismatch between available babies and prospective parents to blame
NEWDELHI Sunita always wanted to adopt a child, but she recently learnt that adoption wasn’t easy in India.
The thirty five-year-old (who spoke on record using a pseudonym) had to convince her family that wanted her own baby. “It is a matter of principle. There are so many children who are orphaned or abandoned,” said Sunita .
After she registered on the website of the Central Adoption Resource Authority (Cara) — a statutory body under the ministry of women and child development that regulates all national and international adoptions — in February, she discovered it was difficult to convince the official adoption system too.
The official, who visited her to compile her home study report on prospective parents, told her that “most of the children up for adoption are abandoned and scarred for life”, that she shouldn’t adopt a child from the northeast as they have “skin problems” and that if she was capable of having a biological child, she shouldn’t adopt at all.
Such cultural and administrative challenges are widespread. Still, the demand for adopting children is rapidly rising in India. The number of Indian adults registered with Cara has more than doubled in under a year’s time, from 7,000 in July last year to 15,200 this May, said Lt Col Deepak Kumar, the chief executive of the organisation. There are also as many as 700 foreigners registered.
Yet, as the demand for adoption has increased, the number of adoptions has more or less steadily dipped. According to figures on the Cara website, there were 5,964 in-country adoptions between January 2011 and March 2012 and only 3,210 from April 2016 to March 2017.
MISMATCH IN NUMBERS
The number of babies available for adoption can’t keep up with the number of prospective parents. “We put up about 300 kids up for adoption every month but receive as many as 1,000 registrations a month,” said Kumar.
He suggested that the adoption figures are dwindling globally, attributing the phenomenon to widely used birth control
measures and there being less of a taboo against unwed mothers. Both these trends result in fewer babies being abandoned or surrendered for adoption, he said.
In India specifically, there are flaws in the system that prevent babies, legally available for adoption, to come to Cara’s notice. Under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, a law that reformed the adoption system and gave Cara greater powers, district child welfare committees are required to produce all children within 24 hours of their being abandoned or orphaned. “But not all abandoned children reach the child welfare committee,” said Kumar. “The awareness about the law is low,” he added. In agreement with Kumar, director of adoption for SOS Children’s Villages KS Dubey, said, “Many families in rural areas are not aware of legal adoption procedures or don’t like to follow the legal procedure.”
INADEQUATE INFRA
Lack of proper infrastructure is another reason Cara does not always learn of adoptable babies. Kumar said that many districts lack an authorised adoption agency even though they are legally mandated. He added many childcare centres are not registered with child welfare committees, which means that babies at such centres cannot be accounted for by the government.
Trafficking, illegal adoptions, and legal alternatives pose similar problems for Cara. Kumar said that many people still use the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Law of 1956, which allows Hindus to give or adopt a baby privately without the involvement of an adoption agency.
NEW SYSTEM
Cara is trying to make itself more appealing. Earlier this year, it instituted a new system that Kumar expects to cut down the wait period for prospective parents and guarantee them more options. In the past, parents were informed about one to three adoptable children at a time depending on the availability, said Kumar. Parents who rejected their choices lost their place in the order of priority. Now, they are being ensured one option every three months over a nine-month span. “We are able to reach out to more prospective parents at the same time with the available pool of children,” said Kumar. But Cara seems to have not solved all the problems. One often repeated grouse against the earlier system was that those with purse power either got a baby sooner or were offered a bigger pool of children to choose from.
Cara, however, intends to make the system more transparent.
“The person who visited us for home study report demanded ~6,000 to do so,” said Sunita. “We paid and did not think of reporting it to Cara as we were afraid that it might get us a bad report,” she added.
Having worn down resistance from both her family and the system and having put her paperwork in order, Sunita is now eagerly waiting to bring a baby home. “Every evening I check how far I have progressed in the waiting queue. I have been told that at the rate at which I am progressing, I should have my baby in the next nine months,” she said, adding even a pregnancy would have required that much of time.