Besides making the adoption laws more humane, a change in mindset is a must
The Supreme Court has shown interest in a plea to simplify adoption laws in India. It is a tough task. The orphan adoption ratio is highly skewed. There are roughly 30 million orphans, but only around 4,000 adoptions are reported annually. The adoption figure reduced to just over 2,000 in the last two years when work was affected by the Coronavirus pandemic. The lockdown period also made orphans of more than one lakh children because their parents or caregivers succumbed to the virus. The problems begin right from when a child is found abandoned. The Child Care Institutes and the Child Welfare Committee complete all legal formalities to declare the child legally free to be adopted and place them under an agency’s care. The system is smooth in urban areas but not so in the countryside and small towns. Some of the CCIs are not even registered. That eventually impacts the total number of legally free children available for adoption. It is also true that a lot of corruption takes place and child traffickers are known to subvert the adoption process and indulge in the illegal sale of infants and toddlers. It is a policing issue that needs an entirely different focus. Be that as it may, the situation in the country is such that the number of prospective parents is in the thousands and very few children are available for adoption. This increases the length of the adoption process.
Parents seeking adoption have their issues. The gender of the child is an issue. They want ‘normal’ children; they rarely prefer children with disabilities. There are cases where parents have ‘returned’ such children. All these are disruptions in the adoption process. The official process is quite complex. There are so many criteria, so many forms to fill, so many institutions to negotiate — all this takes a lot of time. The legal process is equally cumbersome. The system is efficient in the big cities but in smaller towns, the cases do not get cleared easily. It depends on the attitude of the local judge. Families visit the courts numerous times, but in vain. There are cases where families have not received court orders even after two years. In others, the Child Welfare Committees do not declare children free for adoption in time and the kids languish in the centres. To speed up the process, the Government recently revised the laws empowering the district magistrates rather than the lower courts to issue adoption orders and monitor the adoption centres. Having said that, the real issue is something else altogether. The approach of the law and that of the adoption centres is parent-centric when it should be child-centric. It is the child’s future that is at stake, and the child has no say anywhere. Gender, age, disabilities, looks, skin colour, literally anything can twist the child’s fate. Bureaucratic processes can easily be rectified, but what about the mindset?