Missionaries of Charity to rejoin govt adoption system

Aditi Tandon
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, October 29

In a move that will add to the pool of adoptable children in India, the Mother Teresa founded Missionaries of Charity has agreed to rejoin the central adoption system in India.

The Missionaries with 79 Indian centres had stopped organising adoptions in India, disagreeing with government rules that opened the doors for single, divorced and separated people to adopt. But today, charity head Sister Mary Prema Pierick led a delegation to meet Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi to discuss the issue.

After the meeting, Gandhi said: “I met the delegation of Missionaries of Charity (MoC) led by Sister Mary Prema Pierick, who is heading the organisation after Mother Teresa. I requested them to come back into the @CARAWCD system of adoption so that children in the 79 MoC homes can go into family care. Sister Prema agreed to my request to work jointly on each of these homes so that the children in the MoC homes can be on-boarded into CARINGS expeditiously.”

The new Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection Act), 2015, mandates every childcare institution to get registered and linked to the Central Adoption Resource Agency, a body under WCD Ministry that facilitates adoptions. It made online disclosures about adoptable children in registered child homes compulsory to stop corruption. Missionaries then cited their religious beliefs to say they can’t honour new guidelines that made it easier for single, divorced and separated people to adopt, effectively making adoptions by homosexuals possible.

“The Missionaries stopped registering as adoption agencies but under the law they cannot do that. We had been urging the Missionaries to get on board the national law on adoptions which is not bound by faiths and is the same for everyone. Today they agreed,” a Ministry source said. The Missionaries were recently in controversy after a sister at their Jharkhand charity was arrested for child trafficking.

Each Missionaries centre in India roughly has 20 adoptable children. Once MoC join CARA, numbers of adoptable children will get a boost easing the current Indian adoption waitlist of over 25,000 parents.

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