New rule...

Deepak Kumar, CEO of the Central Adoption Research Authority (CARA), a statutory body to monitor and regulate in-country and inter-country adoptions, said that 800 to 850 adoption cases are pending in civil and family courts at any given time.

“Though the JJ law mandates that courts have to dispose of adoption cases within two months from the date of filing of application, seldom does it happen. There are cases that have been pending for more than a year also,” Kumar said, adding that the move to empower district magistrates (DMS) would bring down the time to approve adoption cases to two months.

Explaining how it would expedite the process, Kumar said: “The DM is on the ground implementing the adoption process. The Child Welfare Committees, which does the verification of prospective parents, comes under him. So source verification and other processes can get completed much faster under DMS.”

While a total of 3,276 children were adopted in India between April 2017 and March this year, the inter-country adoption figure was 651. At the same time, the number of prospective parents waiting to adopt children went beyond 15,000. Though there is no official data, surveys by non-government organizations say there are approximately 50,000 orphans in the country, and suggest that a much higher number of children should be up for adoption. A former central government employee, who did not want to be named, said that it took her a little over two years to complete the process of bringing her adopted daughter home. “It took me four months to get the court clearance. But mine was an exception. I was in the government; I knew the rules, had contacts and used it to get the court case expedited. During the course of my visit to the Varanasi family court, where my case was going on, I got to know of parents who have been waiting for over a year to get the approval,” said the official, who left her job in 2016 to take care of her daughter.

The government adopted an exhaustive framework in 2015 to plug the holes in the system, but the adoption figures continue to low because of the delay in getting legal clearances.

But child rights activists cautioned that the changing the process was fraught with risks. “At least there were adequate checks and balances at the moment. That may not be the case now. In the name of making it more effective and expeditious, we will make children more unprotected in a country where so many children go missing every year,” said Enakshi Ganguly, co-founder of child rights group HAQ.