The government, in a new set of regulations for child adoption, have proposed that parents who have given their children up for adoption cannot claim them back again, reports Chetan Chauhan.
The government, in a new set of regulations for child adoption, have proposed that parents who have given their children up for adoption cannot claim them back again.
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The draft guidelines on the adoption of Indian children without parental care, released on Wednesday, proposes to bring adoption of orphaned, abandoned or surrendered children under the Juvenile Justice Act, 2006, thereby giving legal sanctity to the adoption process.
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JK Mittal, chairperson of the Central Adoption Resource Agency (CARA), said: “Once child adoption comes under the JJ Act, there will be uniformity in the child adoption process in the country.
Secondly, adoption will mean legal separation of the child from his or her biological parents.”
Under the new guidelines, the time required for adoption has been reduced to three months from the existing six months. “The courts will have to settle adoption claims in two months as per the JJ Act,” Mittal said.
The government also wants to adopt the international child adoption standards. For this, Hague convention regulations have been incorporated in the proposed guidelines. It will result in the child getting citizenship immediately after touching the country of his or her adoption. Normally, it takes two-three months.
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Inter-country adoption will not be allowed through an agency anymore. Foreigners will have to apply directly to CARA, which will then direct them to a registered agency for child adoption. “It will break the nexus between agencies,” Mittal said.
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Inter-country adoption will not be allowed through an agency anymore. Foreigners will have to apply directly to CARA, which will then direct them to a registered agency for child adoption. “It will break the nexus between agencies,” Mittal said.
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The guidelines also propose mandatory state government registration of all childcare homes. Women and Child Development Minister Renuka Chowdhury said the Centre will make HIV/AIDS test mandatory for all children admitted by the adoption agencies. CARA will also create a central data bank on children for adoption within India and outside.
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.
