IN MARCH, AN orphanage on the outskirts of Hyderabad in Ameenpur asked a teenage girl, who alleged she was raped, to leave the institution following the lockdown. Police said that the 14-year-old, whose parents had died years ago, may have been subject to repeated sexual abuse at the orphanage. Finally, she was forced to return to her relatives who had put her in the orphanage in 2015. Shortly, while at her relatives’ home, she had to be admitted to a hospital due to the injuries she had sustained from repeated rapes. The girl died in a government hospital last month, bringing to the focus, yet again, multiple jeopardies children face in orphanages in India, especially when relatives and even their parents are too uncaring to pay a visit even after years.
All this is an outcome, avers Pune-based child-rights activist Smriti Gupta, of our officials not “defining the word ‘caring’ by family” of children forced to live in government-run or privately operated childcare centres, also called shelters and orphanages. The inadequate definition of ‘caring’ means that children are not freed from the clutches of their indifferent parents and not placed for adoption. While it is true that poor parents, especially migrant workers, do place their children in shelters and maintain warm ties with them, Gupta rues the policy of prioritising parents and not the kids.
Gupta is the CEO of the meaningfully titled charity organisation ‘Where Are India’s Children?’ Her argument is that the mindset of lawmakers and officials is to focus on what parents want, notwithstanding their dubious record as uncaring ones. Her organisation’s title verbalises her own vision and purpose. “I had made up my mind as a student that I would not have children of my own, but would adopt them. I didn’t want to marry either, but then when I was doing my master’s in electrical engineering, I met my husband and Cupid struck. I told him we would adopt children, and he readily agreed,” says this former US-based employee of Wikimedia Foundation, the parent company of Wikipedia. Both her children are adopted. It was when she decided to adopt the second one, after the first one turned three, that she realised it was not a cumbersome process, mostly because new rules stipulated that prospective parents would be allotted options by the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA), a statutory body that falls under the Ministry of Women and Child Development.
Yet, in the CARA pool, there were very few children compared with those living in childcare institutions. So, while many parents want to adopt, there are very few children available. That was the trigger for Gupta to launch her NGO to help identify more children who needed to get adopted and live with normal families. “The Hyderabad girl should have been in the adoption pool,” she says with a whiff of regret.
Over 30,000 parents in India are waiting to adopt while the ‘pool’ has barely 2,000 children. According to the Government, the CARA, which maintains this pool, functions as the nodal body for adoption of Indian children and is mandated to monitor and regulate intra-country and inter-country adoptions. Its website says, ‘CARA is designated as the Central Authority to deal with inter-country adoptions in accordance with the provisions of the Hague Convention on Inter-country Adoption, 1993, ratified by the government of India in 2003.’ The new rules came into force in 2013.