“This decision was arrived at by the Missionaries of Charity Headquarters in Kolkata soon after we received the new “Guidelines Governing Adoption of Children, 2015″ issued under a notification from the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development”, the statement had said.
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However, Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi said on Thursday that the charity itself had written to the government asking to be derecognised.
The secretary of India’s central adoption agency, Veerendra Mishra, told The Indian Express newspaper that the organization objected to the prospect of single women and divorced parents adopting children, according to the new guidelines.
The Trinamool Congress (TMC) on Sunday welcomed the Missionaries of Charity’s decision of discontinuing adoption centers and said that nobody should pressurise them as they are doing good work.
As many as 13 of the 16 centres of Missionaries of Charity have sought de-recognition following the new guidelines.
That means children from any orphanage can potentially be matched with single parents anywhere in the country, something that the nuns of Mother Teresa’s order frown upon.
In recent months, the government has overhauled India’s complex adoption bureaucracy to reduce the long, frustrating waiting period faced by prospective parents and boost the country’s woefully low adoption rates.
There are no official data on the number of children available for adoption in India, though estimates by several rights groups say it is in the tens of millions. “They do not want to come under a uniform secular agenda”. She gets what God gifts her. Here too we allow only one chance, we match the baby as per the parents’ background, skin colour etc but parents are not allowed a choice, even if the child has a deformity. It said, “Complying with all the provisions would have been hard for the organisation”. They are certainly not for religious people like us….
Moreover, the new law suggests that parents will be given an option to choose between 4 to 6 children before they adopt one. “Our belief does not allow us to comply with the new guidelines”.
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Citing children’s need for both a mother and a father, the religious order said it would rather take a firm stand than yield to pressure to change its criteria for adoption.
