The child adoption system in our country is flawed,” businessman Abhinav Krishan Aggarwal voices out, over a telephone call. Aggarwal’s disillusionment stems from his and wife Renuka’s experience of adopting a toddler from Mumbai around six years ago. The couple already had a college-going daughter then. “One of our relatives was undergoing IVF treatment and was approached by Pawan Sharma who ran the centre. He told them that they could adopt a boy through a Mumbai-based NGO called First Step,” says the 44-year-old Delhi-resident. “He showed us a photo of an infant and told us that his mother was unable to raise him and wanted to give the baby up for adoption. While our relative was not keen, we decided to adopt the child instead.”  As the procedures prescribed by Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) under the Juvenile Justice Act (JJ Act) were lengthy and time-consuming, Aggarwal contacted Sharma and directly adopted the baby.” They became legal parents to the boy in 2016, and even enrolled him in a preschool in Delhi later that year.

In February 2017, Aggarwal received his son’s birth certificate, and assumed that all paperwork had been completed. A few months later, his child was taken away from him, after the police unearthed a child trafficking racket. The Mumbai police booked Aggarwal, his wife and six other couples who had also adopted kids through Sharma, under various sections of the IPC for human trafficking. The boy was sent to an NGO-run charitable home in Chembur. After seeking bail, Aggarwal and the other parents appealed to CARA to secure custody of their children in 2019; they even filed adoption petitions before the Mumbai Civil Court. It was only after a long legal battle that he received custody of his son in 2020, under the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act, 1956. The child is now seven years old.  The act deals specifically with the legal process of adopting children by a Hindu adult.