Adoption gone awry: Four parents, but no home for 11-year-old
AHMEDABAD: Call it the parent of all paradoxes: an 11-year-old girl (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/11-year-old-girl)
who has biological as well as adoptive parents has been sent to a child protection home
(https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/child-protection-home). While the adoptive parents have taken a moral stand and
want to return the child to her real mother and father, the biological parents have no legal standing to take back their daughter.
In this case of adoption gone (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/adoption-gone) awfully awry
(https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/awry), South Bopal residents Kamaljeet Mahendiratta and his wife Sheeba, a lawyer,
in July this year moved an adoption annulment application in Ludhiana court in Punjab. It was a heartbreaking decision for the
Mahendirattas who had adopted the child through Child Adoption and Resource Agency (CARA) in June 2018.
The couple, already parents to a 14-year-old daughter, had wished to complete their family. They got her home in September
2018, renamed her Veeva, and had even admitted her to an international school in Ahmedabad to give her the best life.
All was well for the first five months till Veeva started getting flashes of remembrance of her family.
“We were shocked that Veeva was neither an orphan, nor an abandoned child,” said Kamaljit Mahendiratta, 45, a finance
executive. “She recalled her parents and three siblings in Punjab. We did not have the heart to keep a child away from her
family.”
The honesty of Mahendirattas’ quest to find the real parents of their adopted daughter is reflected in the fact that they tracked
them down to Ludhiana. The Ludhiana police had failed to do that.
Mahendirattas said Veeva was wronged by the system. “She went missing on May 11, 2018, and was placed in SGB
International Orphanage on May 14,” Mahendiratta said. “The parents filed a missing person’s complaint on May 16. The first
display of apathy was from police, who failed to find the girl despite all stakeholders being in the same city.”
Sheeba is aghast that Veeva was put up for adoption within two months. “How is it possible to clear a child for adoption without
a proper inquiry or verification? The agency also misled us about the age of the girl,” she said.
The biological parents, Gopal and Hema Tepri, who are daily wagers, are equally shattered. “We came to know our girl is alive
only when the good couple from Ahmedabad contacted us,” Gopal said. “Authorities are not giving us our girl. They say the
court will decide on the matter. Recently, we took the boys to get rakhi tied by their sister.”
The chairman of Ludhiana’s child welfare committee, Jatindar Pal Singh, said that the committee
which oversaw the girl’s adoption was reconstituted in August, 2018. “I will have to check if there
were any lapses,” Singh said.
An official of the Punjab State Adoption Resource Agency (SARA) said all procedures were followed. “The girl has a history of
fleeing from home. The annulment of adoption can happen only through a court order,” the official said.