Indians adopting more than ever

Indians are adopting more than ever and girls are the chosen ones but north India, where the sex ratio is heavily skewed in favour of boys, is bucking the trend. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Mar 4, 2011, 24:41:04 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Indians are adopting more than ever and girls are the chosen ones but north India, where the sex ratio is heavily skewed in favour of boys, is bucking the trend.

In 2010, 5,693 children found homes in the country, up from 2,169 in 2008, latest government data shows. There has been a fall in adoptions by foreigners — 804 in 2008 and only 587 last year. “Adopting children from poorer nations in Africa is much easier. Hollywood star Angelina Jolie has been a great ambassador for the continent,” a government official said on condition of anonymity.

A Dutch woman, who had worked in Pune for years, wanted to adopt a child from India but couldn’t get past the legal hurdles.

She then opted for a Senegalese child.

“The guidelines are cumbersome. It takes two to three years to get court clearance,” said JS Mittal, chairperson of Central Adoption Resource Agency (Cara). “Our revised guidelines are yet to be cleared by the government.”

But that hasn't deterred young Indians in metros except those in Delhi. Mumbai saw the maximum adoptions, followed by Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore and Hyderabad. The states of which these cities are capitals have the least skewed sex ratio in the country for children below 6.

States such as Delhi, Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab and Gujarat, where there are more boys than girls, have been slow to take to adoption. The numbers for Mumbai and Pune together are the same as those for these five states put together.

People in the north are reluctant to adopt from outside the family and that, too, could be a factor for the low adoption rate, an official said.

What is heartening is that more girls than boys are finding parents in young couples in big cities. More than 55% couples have adopted girls—a trend which was catching up, a Cara official said.

Still, it’s a long road ahead. Only a fraction of children who end up in orphanages — those run by the government and private bodies — are fortunate enough to find a home.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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