Alka, 18, lost her father to the COVID-19 pandemic. He was the sole breadwinner in a five-person family. After his passing, Alka was forced to give up her studies and take a job at a construction site to care for her younger siblings and her ailing mother. Alka gave up her studies to offer her siblings the chance to break free from the crushing shackles of poverty, however, she and her siblings are not alone. More than 28 million children in India are abandoned or orphaned. Although this figure is astonishing, India has very low adoption rates. Ironically, although there are millions of children without parents, there is also a growing number of infertile couples, for the majority of whom adoption is the final option.
There are two explanations for why adoption is just not more widespread in India. First, most Indians have a distorted view of adoption because they desire biological children. For starters, people think that these children are a more accurate representation of themselves. Parents frequently desire their children to come from the same cultural and socioeconomic background as them and they believe that biological children are more likely to be successful and healthy. Most Indian parents choose a kid between the ages of zero and two because they feel the parent-child link is formed during infancy. They are also wary of adopting children with special needs, and the majority of such children are adopted by foreign families.
Second, since the ratio of abandoned children to children in institutional care is disproportionate, and legally, there aren’t enough children available for adoption. District-level officials do not take their jobs seriously enough, and government indifference is causing them to operate without scrutiny. Many child-care institutes (CCI) are not regulated by the state and are not linked to adoption agencies, making the children at these institutions opaque to the adoption pool. Even when they are connected to agencies, the paperwork is not completed, often for years, and the child is not legally free for adoption. Children in unregistered CCI are subject to inadequate care, physical and sexual abuse, and trafficking.
Adoption rates in India will rise as more parents are prepared to adopt, which will require us to abandon the age-old concept that we must pass on to our bloodline and heritage. Besides, there is a lack of knowledge about the adoption procedure, as well as a lack of counseling. To tackle this problem, the adoption process should be made more open, and prospective parents should be mentored with adoptive parents for at least six months to eliminate the dread of the unknown. Also, unregistered CCIs should be closed down promptly to limit the danger of abuse. The government should also allocate additional resources to the establishment of new CCIs, as well as a strategy to shift millions of kids off the streets and into CCIs.
Despite the adoption-related legal snags, the situation does have a bright side. More parents are choosing adoption nowadays, according to the Central Adoption Resource Authority, for a number of reasons other than infertility. Many individuals stepped forward to adopt the pandemic orphans after the COVID-19 pandemic. Even childless rural couples are expressing interest in adopting. This offers a glimmer of optimism that orphans’ prospects in India are not as dire as they might seem.
