Expectant parents waiting for their adopted child to come home to them and other couples contemplating adoption can now heave a sigh of relief. The women and child development ministry has brought in a slew of guidelines to make the process of adoption quicker and transparent, besides cutting down on red-tape.
After waiting for more than a year for the amendments to the Juvenile Justice Act to be cleared from the Rajya Sabha, minister Maneka Gandhi has bypassed and introduced these guidelines to quicken the process.
So far, it takes no less than 3-4 years for expectant parents to complete adoption procedures and bring their child home. But the new guidelines have introduced a fixed timeframe to complete the procedures, online registrations, treat NRIs on par with Indian citizens, monitor adoption agencies and introduce provision of pre-adoption foster care.
Soon, a prospective parent can register online through the child adoption resource information and guidance system and check for children legally available for adoption according to age, language and other criteria. The Central Adoption Resource Authority, the nodal agency for adoption in India, has created a database of children available for adoption and has connected with adoption agencies across the country.
This will also reduce the waiting list for NRIs, who wish to adopt. Their processes currently take much longer than locals, because they were treated as foreign nationals. At present, only 20 per cent children given for adoption go to NRI homes. There are an estimated 10,000 parents who would like to adopt. The new guidelines hope to quicken the adoption process for them and reduce the waiting time considerably.
This may even help in increasing adoption rates, which had dipped considerably in the last 3-4 years. Data provided by minister Maneka Gandhi during the Lok Sabha session this year shows that less than 4,000 children were placed for adoption in 2013-14, fewer than the 4,964 in 2012-13 and 5,964 children in the previous year.
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