Parliament gives approval to changes in Indian Adoption of Children Bill

joint committee of Parliament has given its approval to changes in the Indian Adoption of Children Bill which after going to the Union Cabinet has been presented to both the Houses in the monsoon session of Parliament. The Bill will make adoption of children legal among all communities in the country.

At present only Hindus have a law which permits a couple to take a child and make him their legal heir. This law only places the child in the foster care of adults and does not bestow upon him the right of inheritance. It also does not guard the parents against losing the child, as they are legally only its guardians.

This Bill, which smoothens out the many legal twists that prevents destitute children from being adopted by a proper home, was drafted twelve years ago. The Bill was finally introduced in Parliament, not got legislative sanction so far, due to filibustering by members who saw in it the opening of the flood gate for Indian children going abroad as cheap labour.

The Indian Council for Child Welfare, a leading organization that handles adoption, helped 99 parents between 1963 and 1973 to take up destitute and orphan children under foster care. Of these, only 11 were Indian couples and the rest were from Sweden, France, West Germany, USA and Belgium.

Under Indian law, none of the children going abroad were legally "adopted" before they left the country. They were only placed in foster care of the families which finally adopted them under their country's law. The new Bill makes a district court the authority to pass an "Adoption order". In the case of foreigners it will issue an interim order which will have to be finalized by the adoption law of the land of the parents.

The adoption order will also straighten out the legal procedure which needs to be followed under the only adoption law in India today. The Hindu law says that a child, when adopted by a Hindu couple, should also belong to the same religion. As in most cases the religion of an abandoned child's parents is not known. Hindu couples too are required to take recourse to the Guardianship and Wards Act and again after some time have to go before a court saying that the child was being brought up in accordance with the Hindu religion and as such could be adopted by them. If the Bill becomes law, the Hindu adoption law will cease to exist. The other important loophole the Bill seeks to plug is to empower the court to act on its own if it comes to know that the adopted child is being neglected or mistreated in any way. This will apply to both Indian and foreign adoptive parents.

There are at present a number of so-called voluntary agencies helping in the adoption of children. The Bill would have all such agencies and institutions licensed under the government.

The Indian Council for Social Welfare in Bombay and the ICCW in New Delhi are two institutions most likely to be awarded such a licence because of their stringent procedure in processing adoption applications. With the ICCW, a foreign parent wanting to adopt an Indian child must get a home investigation done by an institution in his own country recognized by the ICCW. ICCW does not entertain any applicant not recommended by the foreign independent agency. The Bill provides that all such investigations be verified by the Indian Consulates abroad and only then will the agency in India be able to place a child in that family.

This long awaited legislation, as one social worker put it, could make all the difference to the lives of destitute children in orphanages.

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