JOURNAL OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION, INDIA VOL. 21, 2022 3. CARA: Scope and Operational Aspects The Central Adoption Resource Agency is a statutory body of Ministry of Women and Child Development, established in June 1990 to regulate, monitor and promote adoption of orphaned, abandoned or surrendered children with the primary objective of providing families to children in need of care and protection.31 Further in 2015, the process of adoption underwent a great transition and with the Child Adoption Resource Information and Guidance System, i.e., CARINGS, it became more streamlined and transparent. The Ministry of Women and Child Development established it as a centralised system and with the help of agencies, a database for adoptable children and prospective parents was created to ensure smooth process of adoption. However, the data gathered over last year suggests that 26,734 prospective adoptive parents have registered with CARA and are waiting for referral for incountry adoption and 1205 prospective adoptive parents are awaiting inter-country adoption32 and as per the information furnished by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, the average time taken for prospective adoptive parents to get a referral for children in the age group of 0-4 years is approximately two years.33 The main reason behind such gap is because majority of abandoned or surrendered children are either not under the care of institutions or under un-registered Child Care Institutions (CCI) and, therefore, fall outside the scope of adoption procedure.34 The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances and Law and Justice has also pointed out the huge mismatch between the number of children willing to be adopted and the number of children legally available for adoption, and suggested that the way to address this would be to ensure that “orphans and abandoned children found begging on the streets are made available for adoption as soon as possible”.35 The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights data show that there are 5,850 registered CCIs in India, but if unregistered ones are also counted, there are more than 8,000 such functioning institutions, and as per regulations, only registered CCIs can be linked to adoption agencies.36 The loopholes like these are reasons that prospective adoptive 31 32 33 34 35 36 80 Central Adoption Resource Authority, Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India Available at: https://cara.nic.in/ about/about_cara.html (Visited on October 7, 2022). 118th Report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Review of Guardianship and Adoption Laws 2022, p. 31 Id., p. 32 Sara Bardhan and Neymat Chadha, “The Challenges and Unaddressed Issues of Child Adoption Practices in India,” The Wire, 16 September 2021 available at: https://thewire.in/society/challenges-issues-child-adoption-practices-india (Visited on October 7, 2022). Review of Laws on Adoption – Observations and Recommendations of the Parliamentary Standing Committee Report, 2022 NCPCR data shows over 1,300 unregistered child care institutions in India, July 15, 2018