Outside the Shukla residence in Delhi’s Rajouri Garden, the sounds are familiar. Children playing, vendors selling their wares, women huddled together chopping vegetables, and a few men gossiping while playing cards. But inside the home, there is an eerie silence. Vishnu Shukla watches with concern as his nieces play with dolls. The two girls are aware of the tragedy that has hit them but have little idea about how uncertain their future is. Vishnu is their maternal uncle and he is now looking after the girls who lost both their parents to the pandemic. They are now, as many call them, Covid orphans.
The Shukla girls are not the only ones. The cases of children losing both their parents to the virus are rising across the country. Kushinagar district in Uttar Pradesh, for example, has reported 28 such Covid orphans. The unofficial number could be more. A prominent journalist couple in Delhi died of Covid and today their 13-year-old daughter is being looked after by her grandparents. But the question is how long will these orphans have family support and how safe are they? Offers to adopt have been pouring in on social media. This alarmed the women and child development (WCD) ministry and its head Smriti Irani stepped in. In a series of tweets, the minister said, “If you come to know of any child who has lost both parents to COVID and has no one to take care of her/him, inform Police or Child Welfare Committee of your district or contact Childline 1098. It is your legal responsibility.”
“It is a criminal offence to take custody of an orphaned child like this and the said person can be charged under IPC 363 (punishment for kidnapping),” said SN Shrivastava, Police Commissioner, Delhi.
It’s an unprecedented situation in the sense that the scale of children losing both their parents to the pandemic is huge and growing, analysts say. Added to this is the problem that the Indian legal system is not equipped to deal with the rights of the child. The first big issue is when parents leave behind property with no will or power of attorney. There have been cases of relatives wanting to adopt a child with an eye on the property, say observers. There is no guarantee that these kids will be loved or cared for in a manner similar to how their parents did.
Not many child rights experts are enthusiastic about institutional care for orphans. They say that 40% of these asylum’s across the country have no safeguards against sexual harassment.
“Their legal rights are protected but there is no clear law to this. It’s important that the children are legally adopted to ensure that their future is taken care of,” said Supreme Court advocate Sanjay Hegde.
A few lawyers are planning to take this issue up with the juvenile justice committee of the Supreme Court as the SC hears Covid-related matters. The worry of these jurists is that in the “current scenario many instances are there when death certificates are not being generated. These children may not be able to access the bank balance or even insurance of their parents who are now dead.” They feel that “some mechanism needs to be thought of to rehabilitate to ensure their insurance and bank policies don’t lapse. And the state has to play an important role.”
According to section 2(14) of the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015, any child who has lost both parents is deemed to be eligible for care and protection. This is where the WCD ministry, which works in close coordination with the National Commission For Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) comes in. The ministry has started a helpline, 1098, and sources say the number of calls is increasing exponentially. But tracking, cross-checking with local police takes time, and in some cases, it may be too late. According to UNICEF, India has over 30 million orphaned and abandoned children. And while it’s tough to get an estimate on the number of Covid orphans, sources say it could be as high as above 20,000. The problem is particularly acute in rural areas where such figures are often not even documented and where the ministry is worried it could give rise to trafficking, especially of girls.
Till December 2020, one in every eight calls were distress ones linked to child trafficking, according to data available. As per UNICEF India, the trafficking of children to Bangladesh, Nepal, etc, has been common over the years. The fear is this figure may have increased in Covid times, especially with many orphans emerging in the second wave that has killed more young adults than the first. The 1098 helpline number is also dedicated to the reporting of child trafficking. According to the government and child rights institutes, even before the pandemic, almost every third case of child trafficking was carried out by a person known to the victim, and sometimes it was a family member. The ministry has now decided to crack down on such cases with the number of Covid orphans steadily rising.
The WCD ministry is also worried that many of these children may lose out on their education if proper guardians are not found. It’s a crisis that has thrown up a slew of challenges for the government and childcare experts. The appeal coming from the ministry is that no one should offer to adopt through social media no matter how good the intentions are, as the tragedy of losing parents may be magnified if the children fall into the trafficking trap.
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