Should India relax its adoption procedures?

Many people believe that CARA’s strict requirements and lengthy procedures for adoptive parents are responsible for the long waiting period for a child. Is this true?

Smriti Gupta: No, procedures are not the reason for these delays. The delays stem mostly from the fact that the number of people waiting to adopt a child is higher than the number of children who are legally free for adoption. There are children with special needs and older children who could be adopted immediately. But a majority of people wait to adopt a young child in the ‘normal health’ category. Most of the delay is the waiting time to be matched (with a child), so changing procedures is not going to do anything to solve the problem of delays.

Aloma Lobo: In the past, we could place children (up for adoption) almost immediately because there were very few parents (willing to adopt). The procedures are necessary. The checks and balances ensure that we don’t have trafficking and improper placements. There have been cases filed in several parts of the world by children who were placed illegally, and we don’t want that to happen here.

Apart from the procedures that parents must follow, there are also procedures involved in bringing children into the adoption pool. Are there ways to speed up this process?

Smriti Gupta: Only children in adoption agencies get evaluated for potential adoptability. I think children in child shelters should also be evaluated. Many children in these shelters, who were abandoned and orphaned, have been there for years and they could be brought into the legal adoption pool. Or at least, their cases should be looked at. This is not being done — because of apathy, lack of training, or lack of resources. That is where our focus needs to be — to bring eligible children into the legal adoption pool at each district level.

Our NGO works with the approval of the State Women and Child Development Department. When we approach these shelters, our first step is to digitise the data of all the children. Using our own open-source software, we have 22 categories, so we can analyse whether a child should continue to be in the shelter or should be brought into the legal adoption pool. We collect data on whether the child was abandoned. On whether the child has parents — and if yes, why the child is there. There are six reasons why a child could be in a shelter. So, we digitise all the data and then the system flags, let’s say, 30 out of 100 children. Then our social workers work on those cases on a case-by-case basis, study the files, complete due diligence, and do the paperwork for those identified as potentially adoptable. Then the child is presented to the Child Welfare Committee of the district, which decides whether the child should be declared legally free for adoption or not.

The 2020 World Orphan Report estimated that there are 3.1 crore children in India who are orphans. We all see children on the streets. Should all these children be available for adoption? Why are there only 2,000-odd children in CARA’s pool?

Aloma Lobo: The word ‘orphan’ is often loosely used. Many of these children have families. Or if they don’t have parents, but may have extended families. Most of the children who come into the adoption stream as babies are those who were relinquished by unwed mothers or because they are girl children; they were not abandoned.

There are children everywhere on the streets. But are they all orphans? Or are they just children with families roaming the streets? Are they truly free for adoption? We need to evaluate that. There are also cases coming to light in several countries of children illegally taken away from their mothers or parents. The parents were told the children had disappeared or died whereas in reality they were given for adoption.

Smriti Gupta: To put it crudely, there cannot be that many parents who have passed away, to say there are millions of orphans. So what we are essentially saying is that there are that many parents who are not raising their children on a day-to-day basis. They have abandoned their children, or they have put their children in shelters, or they have relinquished them. And those children do need a second family, a permanent home. We need to examine the status of all these children. Are they being raised in a safe environment where they are wanted? And if not, what is the next step for them?

There have been multiple exposés of international adoption abuse. There is an acknowledgement that such abuse arose partly due to high ‘demand’ by adoptive parents, leading to the trafficking of children to ensure adequate ‘supply’. What safeguards do we need to ensure that children are not treated as commodities in a ‘demand-supply’ situation, leading to trafficking?

Smriti Gupta: That is where the procedures come into play, and should not be relaxed. The checks and balances are needed for parents to make sure that people who are adopting children are prepared for it; that they are doing it for the right reasons. And they are needed for children so that only truly eligible children are brought into the legal adoption pool. There has been a lot of improvement over the last few years.

On the demand-supply concept: we work with shelters where children tend to be more than 6 years old. The age group you are talking about comprises babies and very young children. And in that case, we do hear of a grey area or black market. Children are not coming into adoption agencies and are not being placed for adoption. They are just being given away. So I would say the bigger risk is, they are not coming into the legal adoption system. I think that is where the trouble is. What you want to do for them — whether they are babies, 10 years old, or 15 years old — is to route them through the legal adoption pool. That is how you avoid all this.

Aloma Lobo: An important factor to remember is that we are finding a family for a child, not a child for a family. We need to go through these checks and balances in the best interest of the child, for the child’s safety and secure placement. The fact is that children can be trafficked easily from nursing homes and hospitals; it happens quite a bit.

This idea that there are very few adoptable children in the CARA system also largely comes down to need for babies. There are many children waiting for families who are over the age of six, as well as children who have special needs. What needs to be done to increase their adoption rates?

Aloma Lobo: I think the worst repercussions come for children who have special needs. I’ve done many placements of children with special needs. I have a child with special needs. And I find that the quicker a child with special needs is placed, the better the child is. But there is a list called the immediate placement list, which I frown upon. There are parents who say, we can’t wait 3-5 years for a baby, so we will take a child from the immediate placement list. And they take a child with special needs and they are not prepared for it. They don’t understand that a child with special needs is a long-term commitment. And they simply return these children. So we must just stop and pause over here and think, should we really place them as “fast” as possible or should we really be child-centric here and be a little careful?

Smriti Gupta: From the time that I adopted a decade ago, I see a change in parents. I do see more children with special needs being adopted, more older children being adopted. But parents need more training and counseling. In international adoption, the agencies conduct a formal training that the prospective parents have to go through. We don’t have an equivalent mandatory training for domestic adoptions here.

Aloma Lobo: The most important thing is to find out is the motivation to adopt. In the past, we did have several sessions of group counseling and individual counseling. But that is gone. Many of the home studies are like intake forms, which are not really adequate. If you compare them to foreign home studies, they are quite different.

Listen to the conversation in The Hindu Parley podcast