Centre to survey child care homes for non-compliance of law

Government will soon conduct a comprehensive survey to create a database of all registered child homes in the country, aiming to trace such institutions not complying with the law.
The survey to be done by the Women and Child Development Ministry will identify those child care homes, which are not complying with the revised guidelines of the Juvenile Justice Act, one of which includes orphanages run by the Mother Teresa Foundation, Union Minister Maneka Gandhi today said.
"Till now the Mother Teresa's (Foundation) orphanages had their own agenda and now when they have to come under a unified secular agenda they are refusing it. They have decided not to follow the guidelines," the minister said.

She said that the ministry will try to persuade them to put children up for adoption.
"We will try and persuade them because they are valuable people and have experience. But if they do not listen then those children will have to be shifted to other places," she said.
There are 16 orphanages of Mother Teresa Foundation which are registered with Central Adoption Resource Agency (CARA) of which 13 have written to the ministry for derecognition.

"They have ideological issues with our adoption guidelines such as they do not want to give child to separated or divorced parents," said a senior CARA official, adding, 13 of its orphanages have applied for cancelling the registration.

The minister said that the survey will help trace all such child care institutions which are not complying with the law. It will be undertaken by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights and non-government organisation called Child Line.
The methodology of the survey would include nomination of at least one government employee by a district magistrate as part of the team along with three other from Child Line members. The team will be given training by the government and a format of details to be looked at.
The ministry has asked the state government to come out with advertisements for inviting unregistered orphanages encouraging them to register with CARA.

"Identifying an unregistered home is not an easy task. We would take support of the district administration and district police intelligence staff to do the job," a senior Ministry official said.
"Getting the unregistered homes into the fold of the system is very important as there is always a possibility of child trafficking in these institutions.
"The Supreme Court has categorically asked us to tell about the state of registered and unregistered homes. We have been asking same to the states and only few have given the information," she said.