2019 adoption racket: Court tells adoptive parents to make biological mother of the child a party to their plea

Mumbai: It is important to hear the biological mother in a case dealing with the transfer of custody of a child to adoptive parents, the Bombay City Civil Court observed on Monday

Mumbai: It is important to hear the biological mother in a case dealing with the transfer of custody of a child to adoptive parents, the Bombay City Civil Court observed on Monday.

The court made this observation while asking a couple, booked in 2019 adoption racket case, to add the biological mother of the child that they seek to adopt, as a party to their plea for custody of the child.

In July 2019, Mumbai police busted a racket of alleged illegal adoption, wherein several couple are said to have bypassed the legal formalities and adopted children by merely paying money to their biological parents, who came from poor economic background. The police had rescued six such children from the “adoptive parents”.

One of the parents, Ramesh Sitap and his wife, had approached the city civil court last year to declare them as guardians of the boy they had purportedly “illegally adopted”. During a earlier hearing, the court had issued a notice to the child welfare committee, in whose custody the child is presently lodged, to respond to the plea.

On Monday, the court asked the petitioner to make the biological mother of the child a party to their custody plea, observing that her say in the matter was more important. The petition is now scheduled for hearing on February 7.

The couple, in their petition filed through lawyer Siddharth Jagushte, had pleaded that they had four daughters. They claimed that in 2011, they were approached by a woman wanting them to adopt the baby (boy) in question as the biological mother was unable to properly provide for him due to their poor financial condition. The baby was just two-days-old in 2011 when they took him as their fifth child.