Not a Hindu? You can’t adopt a child

Sushmita Bose

The Hindustan Times, New Delhi, October 17 2004

In India, if you are not a Hindu, you cannot adopt a child and be a “parent”. All you can be is a “guardian”. Effectively, legality takes a backseat: so, if you die intestate, your “adopted” child has no legal rights.

What’s playing spoiler in a country teeming with 44 million destitute children is a 105-year-old Act — the Guardians and Wards Act 1890. Hindus (Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs included), on the other hand, are governed by the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act 1956, which is surprisingly forward-looking, and even has provisions for single, non-minor women who want to adopt.

“A movement towards a uniform adoption procedure started in the 70s, but every time the Bill came to Parliament, it got shot down because members of the minority communities didn’t want anything impinging on their personal laws,” says Leila Baig, secretary, Coordinating Voluntary Adoption Resource Agency, the body that governs adoption centres in Delhi, adding there have cases where non-Hindu families had been unaware of this distinction and had given up on adoption once they realised that they couldn’t be “legal parents”.

Foreigners can tweak things: after obtaining “guardianship” here, they seek legal rights once they get back to their own country.

The Juvenile Justice Act was amended in 2000 to take care of this discrepancy — but has been put in cold storage. According to Vikas Pahwa, advocate, Supreme Court, Section 41 of the Act dealing with “adoption of neglected children” was included. “Community is no bar under the JJ Act,” he says. But, says Baig, since the Act does not specify legal rights for the child, it is being fine-tuned in the face of opposition. As Ila D. Hukku, Director, Development Support, CRY, says, “Legislation must provide to the adopted child the same legal status as to a child out of legal wedlock.”

It is also felt that the minorities, like the rest of Indians (Catalysts for Social Action, a Pune-based NGO that specialises in adoption, say that Indians living in India adopt less than 2,000 children per year), are not too keen on adoption. For instance, Himadri De, administrator of the Church of North India-run Shishu Sangopan Graha, says, “In the last 10 years, only two Christian families have adopted children from us, so we are happy to give our kids to non-Christians.”

LEGAL TANGLE

* Muslims, Christians and Parsis cannot "legally" adopt a child. They can only be "guardians", and the child gets no legal rights by default

* Non-Hindu foreigners who adopt Indian kids can seek legal standing in their own countries after obtaining a "guardianship" here.