PUNE: A shared thread binds Sulakshana, Paul, Ratna and countless adoptees separated from their origins early in life: a quiet sense of difference, an unnameable absence, and an enduring quest to find their mothers.
Sulakshana was among the several inter-country adoptees who had filed applications with Central Adoption Resource Agency in 2025–26, seeking to trace their biological parents in different parts of India. Paul visited India in 1995 and Ratna in 2018 on their own. By the end of this year or early 2027, Sulakshana plans to visit India in search of her mother and her story.
 

TOI traced the trio and their stories that begin in fragments, shaped by circumstances and culminate in silence.
‘Your mother is India’

In the winter of 1999, after four daughters, hunger weighed heavier than affection in Sulakshana’s family in Nagpur, Maharashtra. At just five days old, she was left at an orphanage — her first severance from her roots. Two years later, she was adopted by a French family and taken continents away, growing up in a home that gave her comfort, but not answers.
Now 26 and training as a legal assistant, Sulakshana is preparing to uncover the story of Mira, the mother she never knew.

For Paul, now 62, the decision to give him up was made even before he was born in 1964. His mother, a nurse from Agra, had fallen in love across caste lines — a union unacceptable in her family. After his birth, he was taken to a Delhi orphanage and soon adopted by a French family working in Kashmir. He grew up in the French Alps, built a life in Europe, and raised a family of his own. But the absence lingered. Holding his newborn son at 30 stirred a turning point. “I had never known someone who was connected to me by birth,” he tells TOI.

Paul’s search brought him back to India in 1995, to a narrow lane in Lucknow guided only by sparse documents. There, he found traces — an uncle, a story, and a warning. Reaching out to his mother, he was told, could upend her new life. He returned to Europe without answers, carrying instead a quiet reconciliation. Today, he visits India often, speaking some Hindi, nurturing friendships, and holding on to a simple truth someone once told him: “Your mother is India.”

 

‘Why are you so brown?”

Ratna’s memories are even more fragile. Born in Calcutta in 1979, her earliest recollections are fleeting — a white building, a staircase, a sense of being moved. At 14 months old, she was placed in a children’s home and later adopted by a family in Constance, Germany. Her childhood was largely happy, but marked by a sharp awareness of difference. In her village, she was the only one who looked like her. “People would come to see me… ask, ‘Why are you so brown? It’s a strange feeling,” she tells TOI over the phone from Switzerland.

In her late 20s, the questions grew louder. Ratna returned to India in 2018, chasing fragments — hospital names, orphanage records — only to find that time had erased most traces. The orphanage had shut down decades earlier, its records lost. Her documents offer only a stark note: “Baby girl… abandoned… possibly illegitimate.” Her search remains unresolved, suspended between what little is known, and all that is missing.

Across these journeys, life abroad offered stability, sometimes joy — but never complete belonging. Many adoptees speak of living between identities, accepted yet apart, loved yet searching. Moments of difference — comments on skin tone, unanswered questions in schoolyards, the silence around origins — shaped their growing years.

‘Where do I come from?’

For Sulakshana, that search intensified recently. After a difficult period in 2023, she began reconnecting with her roots — through films, music, food and conversations with other adoptees online and social media groups. What began as curiosity soon revealed inconsistencies. Her birth certificate records her name as ‘Sulochana’, while orphanage documents call her Sulakshana.

With help from Indian authorities, she recently obtained long-withheld files. Those led her to a breakthrough — and more questions. A phone call with a man, believed to be her father, revealed a different story: an unwed mother, cast out of her village, battling distress, later dying of tuberculosis. Mira, from the Gond community, had passed away a decade ago.

“I believe my mother, consciously or not, helped me have a better life,” Sulakshana shares with TOI. There is no resentment — only a quiet need to understand.

Because for adoptees like her, Paul and Ratna, the search is not always about finding someone. Often, it is about making peace with absence, piecing together identity from fragments, and answering a simple, enduring question: Where do I come from?

Fiom and INEA will collaborate more closely on a number of projects to strengthen the international network surrounding search requests from internationally adoptees. This collaboration also takes place within the International Social Service (ISS) network, in which Fiom is active.

Division of Roles
In this collaboration, both organizations complement each other. Fiom is the central point of contact for internationally adoptees with an individual search request and conducts searches via the ISS network. INEA focuses on strengthening search opportunities in countries of origin and coordinates with Fiom regarding countries where an ISS partner is active, in order to ensure and improve alignment with existing structures.

Children adopted through Terre des Hommes in Switzerland were subjected to medical experiments. Now, female politicians want to know who was responsible. 

The Observer exposed questionable practices in early April : Adopted children from India, Korea, and other countries were subjected to medical tests in at least ten Swiss hospitals during the 1960s and 1970s. Upon arrival, they were systematically quarantined. The Observer was able to substantiate these cases with a wealth of documents.

During the same years, the aid organization Terre des Hommes Lausanne also brought a large number of children and young people with heart conditions from crisis regions such as Morocco and Algeria to Geneva. They subsequently underwent open-heart surgery at the Geneva University Hospital, a highly experimental procedure at the time: Several doctors – including the cardiac surgeon and professor Charles Hahn – were themselves members of the aid organization's board. Deaths occurred repeatedly during the operations; at times, almost half of the operations failed, as documents found by the Observer in the Lausanne State Archives reveal.

Edmond Kaiser founded the aid organization Terre des Hommes. He died in 2000.

(Photo by Camille BAS-WOHLERT / AFP)

Norway’s final report on international adoptions has turned Costa Rica’s recent file review into a sharper official finding: Norwegian authorities did not do enough to understand how some Costa Rican children were declared abandoned before being sent abroad for adoption.

Costa Rica Videos

A Norwegian commission is questioning the procedures that led to 101 Costa Rican children being declared abandoned and sent abroad for adoption. What were the findings of this investigation?

A commission created by the Norwegian government to investigate possible irregularities in international adoptions questioned the way in which dozens of minors were declared abandoned in our country before being sent abroad for adoption.

The findings are part of an independent investigation into international adoptions to Norway from 1960 to 2024, a period in which 20,464 adoptions of children from 36 countries were carried out in that country. 

The study dedicated an entire chapter to Costa Rica, as between 1975 and 1992, Norwegian families adopted 101 children of Costa Rican origin. The adoptions were carried out through the agency Adopsjonsforum and in coordination with the National Children's Welfare Board (PANI).

A Singapore couple told CNA that they were handed a baby in a restaurant in Malaysia and told to take her and go, without any paperwork.

SINGAPORE: Singapore adoptive parents Sarah and Adam were in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, waiting nervously at a fast-food restaurant to meet a baby they were looking to adopt when a woman walked in with the newborn in her arms.

After a brief conversation, the woman told the couple to “take now … bring this baby back now”.

The couple was shocked – their adoption agent did not turn up, there was no paperwork and almost no information about the child.

early one-third of registered adoptions in Iran over the past decade were illegal, according to state welfare data, exposing a hidden child-transfer market that advocates say can leave babies vulnerable to sale, abandonment, domestic servitude and other forms of abuse.

Parisa Valentina Pouyan, director of the Pouya Helpers of Child Workers Institute, told Iran’s labor-focused ILNA news agency that baby-selling is a hidden and complex phenomenon driven not only by poverty but also by addiction, cultural pressures, weak oversight, lack of parenting education and failures in state protection systems.

“Buying and selling children is one of the most horrifying forms of social harm and one of the most damaging acts committed against children,” Pouyan said.

Her remarks followed renewed attention in Iranian media to the case of a mother accused of selling several of her newborns over different years for small sums, reviving concerns about underground markets for infants and the future awaiting children transferred outside legal adoption channels.

A recent analytical report by Iran’s State Welfare Organization, known as Behzisti, found that illegal adoption remains a serious challenge for the country’s child-protection and judicial systems.

Three adoptees from Chile have sued the Danish state for violating their right to family life. The plaintiffs claim the state approved, promoted, and contributed to their illegal adoptions despite possessing their “deficient” and “questionable” adoption papers. They argue that the state failed to effectively supervise the private organizations responsible for bringing them to Denmark.

Each plaintiff has demanded 250,000 kroner in compensation, a claim the Ministry of Social Affairs and Housing has rejected. Previously, eight adoptees from South Korea also sued the Danish state in similar cases, demanding 250,000 kroner each for human rights violations due to insufficient control over adoptions.

I was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1955.

Nearly seventy years later, I am still trying to prove who I am.

For most people, the facts of their birth are straightforward. They know who their parents are, where they come from, and how their story began. Their identity is supported by family history, records, photographs, and shared memories.

My search for the truth about my birth has taken nearly thirty years and is still not over.

I was almost forty years old before I learned that Donna Kole existed.

About the investigation

The Independent Investigation into Historical Intercountry Adoptions from the Republic of Korea to Australia will review adoptions from the Republic of Korea (ROK) to Australia between 1964 and 1999.

The investigation responds to long-standing concerns raised by adoptees, families and advocates. It aims to examine Australia’s role in these adoptions. It also aims to support transparency, accountability and healing.

Robert Cook will lead the investigation. He has over 30 years of legal and judicial experience. This includes a decade as an Australian Capital Territory Magistrate and Coroner and 3 years as Head of the Children’s Court.

We have engaged external auditors to assist with the investigation.