It’s a humane issue. Simplify, don’t complicate
One may worry that in the last quarter (April to June), the number of children who were adopted in India fell yet again. Or, one may take comfort from the fact that in the quarter before (January to March), the number had risen for the first time in three years. Either way, it doesn't make much of a difference. Quarterly variations notwithstanding, the number of children adopted in this country every year has consistently fallen in recent times.
From almost 6,000 adoptions in 2012, it has now come down to about 4,000, according to the Central Adoption Resource Authority. This is worrying. In a country where tens of thousands of orphans are waiting to be placed in permanent homes and hundreds of parents are also waiting to adopt children, it is inexcusable that the system to legally bring them together is so flawed and cumbersome that only a fraction of the possible adoptions is actually completed. Sample this: Currently, there are about 10,000 parents who are registered with Cara and waiting to adopt, but the national-level institution has only about 1,200 children available for adoption.
Also, many of these children either require special care or are older than two years, making them less desirable to the average adoptive parent. On the other side of the spectrum, it would be helpful to know the total number of orphans in the country — except that there are no official figures. In 2011, SOS Children's Village analysed data from the National Family Health Survey-3 for the 2005-06 and the population data from the Census of India, and estimated that about 20 million children — four per cent of India's entire population — are orphans.
The solutionIJ Fix the adoption system. The existing rules are so complicated that they scare away potential parents. They also put an enormous amount of pressure on an ill-staffed system that has scarce resources. This is one of the reasons why the wait-time for adopting a baby can go up to four years. Also, the adoption agencies have become lackadaisical. They are neither seeking to bring in more babies nor pushing for the adoption of those already in their care.
There have been instances where agencies, with crèches full of children, have turned away individuals seeking to adopt, simply because they couldn't be bothered to go through the hassle of an adoption case. In short, the entire system is collapsing — even as another illegal and corrupt parallel system is emerging. Babies are being bought and sold like commodities; many are stolen from hospitals and nursing homes or snatched from their homes to meet the growing demands of the adoption market. More than 1,00,000 children go missing every year, and a proportion of that could be ending up as illegal adoptions.
Union Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi has sought to overhaul the adoption system since she took office last year — she has cracked down on poorly performing adoption agencies, shuttered many illegal NGOs that were involved in the baby trade, and is putting adoption databases online to increase transparency. Ms Gandhi is also pushing amendments to the Juvenile Justice (Care And Protection Of Children) Act, 2000, which should be make the system more adoption-friendly.