Millennium
Post: New Delhi: Monday, October 07, 2019
Unsafe
abandonment including instances of infants found left in the open diarrhoea and
acute respiratory infections are among the leading causes of death of 776
children in specialised adoption agencies across India over the last three
years, government agency CARA has said.
Other
reasons for the deaths of the children in the age group of 0-6 in SAAs, run
both by state governments and NGOs, are pre-term birth complications and
congenital anomalies, the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) said in
response to an RTI query by PTI.
In
July this year, Women and Child Development Minister Smriti Irani said in
response to a question in the Lok Sabha that 776 children had died over the
last three years in specialised adoption agencies (SAAs).
According
to data given in reply to PTI's RTI query, of the 434 SAAs, 355 are run by NGOs
and 79 by governments in various states.
The
deaths were reported from 44 government-run SAAs run and 283 SAAs run by the
NGOs, the CARA said.
According
to an official, the SAAs have 7,074 children, some who have been orphaned or
abandoned and some who have families but placed in the care of the adoption
institutes.
The
deaths would, therefore, account for 10 per cent of the total number of
children in the institutions.
The
highest, 124 children deaths, at the SAAs between April 1, 2016, to July 8 this
year were reported from Uttar Pradesh followed by Bihar at 107 and Maharashtra
at 81, according to the RTI reply.
In
many cases, a senior official said, the children were brought to the SAAs in
such a tenuous health condition that their chances of survival were very bleak.
"Even
if they were brought to the agency in time, they were extremely vulnerable to
diseases and could not survive despite treatment," the official said.
A
caregiver at a specialised adoption agency in central Delhi added that they
have received babies who were found after 48 hours of being abandoned.
Once,
he said, a two-day-old child was found in a pool of water after a long night of
rain in the city.
"By
the time he was brought in, he had developed severe pneumonia and passed away
in a couple of hours," he said.
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