NGO cites e-stamp paper sales, says adoptions bypassing JJ Act

NEW DELHI: Citing over 13000 e-stamp papers issued for adoption between January, 2018 and November 10 this year, as

revealed in response to an RTI plea, voluntary organisation, Families of Joy (FoJ), has expressed concern that many adoptions

are taking place through deeds executed under the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act 1956 to avoid monitoring and bypass

the rigorous process laid out under the Juvenile Justice Act 2015.

The JJ Act allows adoption through specialised adoption agencies under stringent procedures laid out by Central Adoption

Resources Authority (CARA) to ensure that no child is given away in adoption illegally. But HAMA is a personal law which has

no monitoring process, allowing parents to resort to executing adoption deeds to avoid the procedures under the adoption

regulation.

FoJ founder Avinash Kumar said since there is no information available on adoptions under HAMA, they decided to file an RTI

seeking information from Stock Holding Corporation of India Limited, the sole seller of e-stamp papers. In 2018 the number of

e-stamp papers issued for adoption deeds was 3779, 4992 in 2019 and till November 10 this year, 4513 stamp papers had been

issued despite the pandemic.

While the number of e-stamp papers issued is not a measure of the exact number of adoptions that may have been executed

but it certainly shows that a very large number of adoptions are happening outside the JJ Act without any monitoring and the

actual figures may be much higher.

Meanwhile, the number of parents waiting to adopt has been rising. Data collated by FoJ from the website of CARA shows that

as of November, about 30,000 prospective adoptive parents (PAPs) were registered with CARA and the number of children

available in the adoption pool was just 2289. Of the total number of children 57% are from special needs category and those in

the most sought after age group of below 2 years add up to a mere 178. Over the last three years, the number of domestic

adoptions executed as per CARA were 3276 in 2017-18, 3374 in 2018-19 and 3351 in 2019-20.

Even the Centre has been grappling with this problem and a review was started earlier this year by CARA to see how to bridge

the gap between the two laws to ensure that all children adopted go through an official registered adoption pool.

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