When the second wave of the devastating Covid hit India in April 2021, hardly any family in India was left untouched by the virus. One of the worst waves experienced by any nation may have subsided, but it has left with it a saga of trauma and death.
As 2021 draws to a close, where many are engrossed in memories of loss and gloom, some look forward to a fresh start. News18.com brings you the stories of those who lost and gained a family this year.
‘Nowhere’ baby
According to a Lancet study, from March 1, 2020 to April 30, 2021, around 1.16 lakh children in India may have lost their parents to Covid. An estimated 25,500 children lost their mothers in the breakdown, some 90,751 lost both their fathers and 12. disease to the parents. An assessment by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) shows that around 3,620 children lost both their parents, some 26,176 lost one of them and 274 children have been abandoned in the country.
Read also | Government takes steps to take care of Kovid orphans, cautions against panic
The plight of orphaned or ‘nowhere’ children gave rise to a heightened chatter about ‘adoption’. While this was considered as a viable option, many also feared the threat of child trafficking, often in the form of social media messages that called for direct adoption of children.
Adoption provides a new lease of life to many
Young couple Nidhi and Kushal were recovering from the loss of their unborn child when the news of their neighbors dying in the second wave of Covid added to their woes. The surviving five-year-old girl of the deceased couple was left in the care of her ailing grandparents. When Nidhi and Kushal moved for legal adoption, the retired grandparents were considering putting the child up for adoption.
“We will go through the legal procedures this January. The past year has been difficult for all of us. We can’t wait to make a fresh start with the newest member of our family,” said Nidhi.
Six-year-old Sakshi (name changed) was found sitting near her mother’s corpse in Faridabad in May when a second wave in India left her orphaned. After closely observing her mother’s death due to Covid, the Child Welfare Committee had expressed little hope of Sakshi’s return to normalcy, until she was taken in by a mother and her family of six children.
Sakshi says that she still sees her mother in her dream, asks her to come with her. However, she resists the urge and says that she has found a new mother and family and now wants to spend the rest of her life with them.
The plethora of unprecedented deaths all around deeply affected Dehradun resident Jai Sharma, who then did the noble cause of helping children who lost both their parents to Covid-19. The founder of the NGO Just Open Yourself (Joy) had planned to adopt 100 orphans. The NGO announced the adoption plan via its Facebook page, with 28 out of 100 already receiving financial support from the organization.
“These children are residents of Uttarkashi, Joshimath, Rudraprayag and Dehradun districts. “Our target is to finance the education of these students for the next 2-3 years, till they become self-reliant,” Sharma told the Times of India. “When the second wave of COVID-19 started, we encountered five such families in the initial two weeks, in which both the parents had died, and the child/children were left alone at home. Some of these The children were in fourth-fifth grade, one was in 12th, and the rest were young. At that time, it came to our mind that this unfortunate scenario was inevitable, and we were to come across more such cases as the pandemic escalated. “
The aforementioned Delhi is only a few in the sea of over 2,000 children who lost one or both parents to the novel coronavirus. Many are still waiting in overcrowded shelter homes and searching for a new family.
But, not every orphan child is adopted
A BBC report said 3,351 children were adopted in the year between 2019 and March 2020, while tens of thousands of children were orphaned. This gap widened in the second Covid wave of 2021 when India recorded hundreds of deaths every hour.
A Kolkata-based shelter home for children says that while inquiries were made by prospective parents about the process of adopting orphaned children due to COVID, the adoption was delayed due to the pandemic and the risk of infection. discouraged many to go ahead with it. ,
The outbreak of the pandemic in March halted the adoption process across India for a number of reasons including lack of information, closure of courts and fear of contracting the infection. These reasons deter prospective parents (PPs) from approaching adoption centres. However, even after restarting the adoption process in June, it could not cross 437, data from the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) showed.
This was confirmed by Anurag Kundu, chairman of the Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights.
“It is a myth that every child is adopted,” Kundu told the BBC in a report, in which she also advocated a short-term focus on foster care rather than full adoption to help alleviate the problem. Of.
Read also | Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla becomes guardian of children who lost their parents to coronavirus
“Family members can always come forward. Parenting is a great idea, but in our country, despite there being a specific provision in the law, it has not taken off,” Kundu said.
Foster care children are cared for by families and friends and do not have to wait in overcrowded care homes to adopt. Experts say this could help improve the dismal adoption rate in India as more families may come forward to temporarily care for such children, which may eventually lead to formal adoption. can.
While the Indian government has announced measures to help orphans, a corpus of around Rs 10 lakh has been set aside for each child, which will be given to them as a stipend from the age of 18-23, says child care specialist The emphasis is on ease. Adoption laws, because they believe that development in the absence of a family can be more harmful to a child’s health than a lack of funding.
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