Inter-Country Adoption: A Legal Perspective

Abstract

In India, presently 18 million destitutes and orphan children are being looked after in various orphanages. Each year, about fifty thousand children become destitute as they are abandoned by the helpless parents and unwed mothers. Hundreds of them die from malnutrition and disease due to lack of clean water and inadequate sanitation. Since children constitute the human resource of our country and they are supremely important national asset, it is the duty of the state and the society to take effective steps to secure and safeguard their welfare and to provide opportunities to them to grow and develop their personality in a healthy atmosphere. Moral sense of society compels us to search a solution to the problems of the abandoned children and Intercountry adoption is only one of such solutions. The object of the paper is to analyse the concept of Intercountry adoption as it is existing today. A comparison of the same under the legal framework of India, United States of America and United Kingdom has also been drawn. The way in which the present Indian adoption laws with reference to Intercountry adoptions can be made efficient within the existing legal framework has also been proposed.