New Adoption Rules

The new adoption regulations, which call for the transfer of adoption applications from courts to District Magistrates, have caused some difficulty in their implementation.

Amendments:

• The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Amendment Bill, 2021, was approved by Parliament in July 2021.
• The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Model Rules, 2016, were then amended and notified.
• According to the Rule, starting on the date that these rules go into effect, all adoption-related cases that are now pending before the Court will be moved to the District Magistrate.

The goal of the bill is:

The purpose of the change was to avoid adoption delays brought on by the court's numerous open cases.

Introducing uncertainty:

• Parents of adoptees cannot acquire birth certificates without an adoption order, which has an impact on school admissions.
• Adoptive parents in one case were forced to admit their child to the hospital, but they are still unable to file a health insurance claim.
• Parents cannot bring a child home from an international adoption by a foreigner or an NRI who lives abroad without a court order and a passport.

Related Concerns:

• Parents, adoption agencies, and campaigners are concerned that this could cause more delays in a protracted and difficult process.
• Conflict: There is an inconsistency in the legislative system because orphans are dealt with by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, while adoption is handled by the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act of 1956, which has the Ministry of Law and Justice as its nodal ministry.
• Adoptions in India are notorious for being drawn-out processes that can take three years to complete, mostly because, according to the most recent statistics, there are only 2,188 children available for adoption while there are around 31,000 parents waiting to adopt a kid.
• Trafficking: It might be difficult to prevent the trafficking of these kids, especially in the eastern states of Bihar, Jharkhand, and West Bengal.
• Emotional trauma affects children who have experienced a crisis such as the death of a family member or their separation from their parents owing to their desertion or death.
• Limited Adoption: This refers to the fact that the government has not allocated sufficient funds to registering children, preventing millions of children from becoming legally adoptable.
• International adoption: In certain cases, the child was adopted internationally but neither parent applied for citizenship; as a result, the child retained his Indian citizenship.

Insufficient Child Care:

• The majority of child shelters never consider the children in their care for adoption, despite the fact that many of them do a fantastic job of caring for children in need.
• The adoption process has the inherent drawback because children are not informed of the circumstance and are kept in the dark.

India has a low adoption rate.

• There aren't enough kids up for adoption since there are disproportionately more abandoned kids than kids in institutions.
• These kids ought to be taken to a (Child Care Institutions) CCI by the district child protection officer, and if their parents can't be located, they ought to be given up for adoption.
• District-level police are operating without accountability because they are not taking their jobs seriously enough and because of the government's indifference.
• According to data from India's National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), there are 5,850 CCIs that have been registered. However, if unregistered CCIs are included in the mix, the number rises to almost 8,000 active institutions, and by law, only registered CCIs are permitted to partner with adoption agencies.
• Additionally, there are 2,32,937 kids throughout all CCIs, registered and unregistered.
• All unregistered CCIs should be shut down right once to lower the risk of abuse because children in the latter are more susceptible to substandard care, physical and sexual abuse, and human trafficking.
• Considering that they want "their genes, blood, and ancestry in their child," the majority of Indians have a distorted view on adoption.
• Adoption in India carries a stigma since it suggests that the adopting couple is infertile. Despite scientific data, Indian culture places a strong priority on concepts of reproduction and family.
• The majority of Indian parents also prefer children between the ages of 0 and 2 since they think that this is when the parent-child bond is first formed.
• Adopting a child with special needs is fraught with anxiety for parents, and most of these kids are taken in by foreign couples.

Way Forward

• To prevent any trouble, courts should be permitted to close adoption cases that have already been presented before them, and only new petitions submitted after September 1 should be forwarded to DMs.
• Along with a plan to get millions of kids off the streets and into CCIs, the government should invest more resources in opening up new CCIs.
• Because children ultimately do not belong to parents, behavioural mindsets associated with children being of my blood need to alter

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