NEW DELHI : The Supreme Court on Monday issued notice to the Centre on a petition seeking leniency in the adoption modalities in the country. A bench headed by Justice DY Chandrachud issued notice to the Centre on the petition filed by The Temple of Healing through its secretary Piyush Saxena.
The petitioner has sought to issue direction to the Union of India for improving the number of adoptions in our country. The petition had cited data and said according to the Indian Society of assisted reproduction, infertility currently affects 10 to 14 per cent of the Indian population. This ratio is higher among couples in urban areas where it impacts one out of six couples and sadly, nearly 3.2 crore couples who are actively trying to conceive suffer from infertility. Many of them desperately want to adopt a child e.g. an orphan, the petition said.
The petitioner has sought to direct the Ministry of Women and Child Development to give adequate publicity to HAMA (Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act, 1956) even though the Act has been formulated by the Ministry of Law. The petition has sought to direct the Ministry of Women and Child Development to make Adoption procedures simple, and superfluous and to scrap the duplicate information.
The petition has sought to direct the Ministry of Women and Child Development to digitalize the registration of orphans and direct the Ministry of Women and Child Development to introduce a scheme for Orphan Adoption Document Preparers. It also sought to direct the Ministry of Women and Child Development to introduce some vocational training at the block level and to reduce the number of pages of the home study report schedule VII to reduce paperwork to make the adoption process simple and corruption-free.
The petition sought to fix the accountability of the Ministry of Women and Child Development for extremely low adoption rates, which is less than 0.1 per cent i.e. 1 adoption per 1,000 (One adoption per thousand orphans), The petition sought to direct the Ministry of Women and Child Development to create a social framework to decide on the adoption cases, along the lines of the Jury Duty by leading citizens across the country which also increases the social cohesion, awareness and contributes to general law and order situation.
“CARA’s system only holds 2000 children at one time. It is indeed pathetic. This also means crores of children can’t become legally adaptable because the Govt. has not applied adequate resources towards getting the children registered. Therefore, the system can’t generate a profile for them until the first 2000 are adopted which of course, is at a standstill since there is no department to check with parents about potential matches outside of the original specifications. Therefore, crores of children are left forever without a chance of being adopted by a family, ” the petition said.
