Where are our children?

A steep decline in fertility, badly regulated adoption, and other impediments are likely to lead to severe social and economic problems

For decades, we have been told that India has an overpopulation problem. However, things have changed a lot in recent times. In China and in Europe, we have seen the adverse consequences of low fertility and a rapid decline in the fertility rate. Though India has not conducted a census since 2011, there is some evidence that suggests a rather rapid decline in fertility. The problems are compounded by the unbalanced sex ratio, as only one gender bears children. It is not widely recognised that the total fertility rate (TFR) in Tamil Nadu is now lower than that in Germany.

We have spent so many decades pondering the problem of overpopulation that we are not yet used to flipping this around. The problem in India in coming years will be one of too few children, and this has severe implications. We have to go to the foundations of how humans make decisions to have children and the family structures around which this can be done well. For each child that has to grow up successfully in this world, we have to think of the family structure under which this child will flourish, and the constraints that limit more persons from forming child-rearing families.

These are fundamentally personal questions and each individual has to choose what is desirable for her. From a public policy point of view, there is a whole system of state coercion surrounding the establishment of families that needs to be reconsidered. As an example, a well-known element that intrudes in India is the government ban on surrogacy, reducing the extent to which some adults are able to construct families of their design.

In a related vein, we should think about the mechanisms for adoption. Many lonely children and lonely parents can be paired off to form beautiful families. Care, of course, needs to be exercised on trying to avoid children being handed into abusive family settings. Each and every success of pairing off an “orphaned, abandoned or surrendered” (OAS) child into a family should be viewed as a moral victory. The numbers of OAS children in India are mind-boggling, possibly as high as 4 per cent of all children, potentially running into millions. The problem is, the present Indian regulatory structures make many mistakes and interfere in the process of adoption.

The Central Adoption and Resource Agency (CARA) of the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development informed the Supreme Court (SC) that the total adoptions in a year have never exceeded 5,000. Further, according to CARA, as of October 2023, only 2,146 children were available for adoption, as against a little over 30,000 prospective adoptive parents. Even by the low standards of Indian state agencies, this is an unbelievably poor performance.

Adoption is a legally regulated activity with a designated public authority charged with the responsibility of ensuring that the process is not abused. There are two critical decision points in this process. The first involves determining whether the child belongs to the OAS category (and hence is part of the pool of adoption). The second is regarding the suitability of the family from the perspective of the child’s wellbeing.

In the Kelkar & Shah four-test framework of evaluating the complexity of a problem in public policy, this is a difficult problem. With over a million-plus children in the fray, this involves a large number of transactions. There is enormous discretion in the hands of front-line civil servants. The stakes are very high for the children and for the parents. The fourth test — secrecy — is not a problem, as there can be ample transparency here. State supervision is thus a difficult problem, given that three out of the four tests of complexity are satisfied.

The 2021 amendments to the law have gone quite some distance in streamlining the administrative and regulatory process. In its orders issued last month in the Temple of Healing versus the Union of India, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court led by the Chief Justice of India (CJI) has ordered expeditious identification of children falling in the OAS category; revamping of administrative infrastructure in the states; accountability in the timelines laid down for completing adoption; and compilation of adequate data so as to channelise children who are placed in foster care into the adoption process.

The implementation of such orders — clearly a step in the right direction — is always a challenge in the environment of the Indian administrative state. A significant issue that will need to be confronted is the problem of the Juvenile Justice Act in defining “orphans”. The present definition is open to interpretation and has led to many decisions that are not in the best interests of the child. In addition, the data should include adoptions made under religious personal laws. In the long term, in line with the subsidiarity principle, adoption approvals should be a state and city subject, not a Union subject.

Technology and civil society organisations (CSOs) can help improve the situation. A CSO active in Telangana, Maharashtra and Karnataka has designed and developed a technology solution, the Child Lifecycle Management Solution. This is specifically designed to ensure that children are tracked from an early stage, with consistent and continuous monitoring.

The state, however, is central to the process of adoption. Given the dangers inherent in over bureaucratising a sensitive human matter and recognising the limitations of the Indian state, there is a need to explore mechanisms through which the problems of high number of transactions involving difficult exercise of discretion can be shared with well-respected CSOs. Each of us can visualise at least one good CSO that can be trusted to do such things and 10 that should not. We need reliable and transparent mechanisms to decide which CSOs to trust.

Less emotionally and more rationally, while one important solution is adoption, other solutions are removal of government constraints on surrogacy and in vitro fertilisation (IVF). Finally, the removal of state limitations on concepts of marriage and on single persons raising children is the way forward.

The writer is an honorary professor at CPR, member of a few for-profit and not-for-profit boards, and a former civil servant