Child adoption agencies in sorry state

inspection of 15 specialised adoption agencies (SAAs) by the ministry of women and child development (WCD) and the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA), carried out in January and February, has discovered glaring irregularities, including premature deaths, unhygienic conditions, and even children not being accounted for in some cases.

SAAs house orphaned and abandoned children below the age of six meant for adoption. There are 460 of them around India. The homes inspected were in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Telangana, West Bengal, Punjab, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

Under the Juvenile Justice Act (JJ Act), SAAs, which are run by private agencies or NGOs in most cases, have to be registered with the government’s Child Adoption Resource Information and Guidance System (CARINGS) for intra- and intercountry adoptions and provide details of each child admitted to the agency. The portal is run by CARA, the government’s nodal agency monitoring adoption in the country.

“We were getting complaints that the credentials of some of the SAAs are not of required standard. So the WCD ministry ordered an inspection,” said Deepak Kumar, CEO, CARA. “To start with, we decided to inspect 15 against whom there were the most complaints.”

The team was taken aback when it visited Jodhpur’s Navjeevan Sansthan, said a CARA official involved in drafting the inspection report who asked not to be identified. “The register showed that 14 children had died between December 2016 and January 2018. We are now seeking an explanation as to how these children had died,” said the official.

NEWDELHI:An