| What is $500? It is the amount you pay on a visit to an amusement park in the USA, said Justice D Y Chandrachud while presiding over the case of a 14-year-old adopted child who was sent back to India from the US in September 2008 after developing behavioural problems.
The judges remark came after representatives of the Federation of Adoption Agencies (FAA) opposed guidelines suggested by a court-appointed expert committee, which recommended that prospective parents from abroad should be made to deposit an amount over and above the standard adoption fee of $3,500. The committee – comprising additional solicitor general Daraius Khambata and Asha Bajpai, a TISS professor – proposed an extra charge of $500 that would be used to generate a corpus to look after children in cases of failed foreign adoption. Couples adopting children with special needs would not have to pay additional amount. The FAA moved an application saying that it was unfair to charge higher fees from foreign couples. The court, however, noted that a sum of $500 was not too much. The court also heard the expert committee that read out the guidelines approved by the Central Adoptive Research Agency (CARA), including the setting up of the corpus. Bajpai informed the court that there existed a National Childrens Fund that is not being utilised and there is a lot of money that has not been put to use. The court has now directed CARA to submit statistics of number of children with special needs who went into adoption during 2007-09. The matter has now been kept for January 29. |