This year marks ten years since I first travelled to India and got involved in alternative care there. As I am about to travel to India again next week, it seems like a fitting moment to contemplate the changes in attitude and approach to alternative care that I have witnessed over that time.
At this moment, residential childcare institutions, or ‘orphanages’, are still the main form of alternative care in India. However, there has been a definite change over the past decade. When I first came to India in 2010, CCIs (as childcare institutions are usually referred to over there), whether state-run, NGO-run, or privately run, were practically the only form of formal alternative care available for children. The alternative was informal kinship care.
At that time, there were not even provisions in the law to allow for family-based alternative care. In India, alternative care falls under Juvenile Justice legislation. And it was not until the Juvenile Justice (or JJ) Act of 2015 that options like foster care or group foster homes were mentioned and thereby became possible. This was a major shift.
With the international momentum of the move towards family-based alternative care growing, pressure on national governments also rose. In India, it seems that this pressure is being felt. And over the past few years, I am getting the impression that the federal government is determined to move away from CCIs and towards family-based alternative care. However, being the federal government, they are not actually the ones who will be taking the action, that lies on the shoulders of the state governments.
Having some dealings with the governments of two Indian states, it seems to me that the federal government is now putting quite a lot of pressure on state governments to get deinstitutionalisation done. It is commendable that they are putting their weight behind this issue. However, there is also a problem. While the enthusiasm and pressure are rising with regards to transitioning to family-based alternative care, in many places in the country there is currently still a lack of knowledge and skills in this area.
This results in local officials getting told to ‘get it done’, without having the knowledge or skills on HOW to get it done. The training and guidance provided is very limited. And this can lead to serious problems.
In a state-run institution for teenagers with intellectual disabilities, the new superintendent started a family tracing programme. This was completely new, no one had made any effort before to discover whether family members of children who had been found in the streets could be found. It was a commendable move, and it was quite successful. The problem lay in the next step. Once the family was found, they were asked to come to the institution. There they were asked if they would take back their child, and if they said yes, the family would leave with the child within an hour or two.
No assessment of the family or the child, no support or training provided to deal with the child’s special needs or the effects of long-term institutionalisation. The child was quite simply sent home, just like that. Not surprisingly, in various cases, we later learned that the child ended up being returned to another CCI, because the parents could not cope.
This was all done with the very best of intentions. However, without the knowledge to handle this complicated process responsibly, even with the best of intentions, you can cause very serious harm.
So, a lot of progress is being made in India, but there is plenty of work still to be done. And being involved in a deinstitutionalisation process there – even if it is a grassroots one – has to involve providing training to the local government representatives, to help them gain the knowledge and skills needed to do the work that is expected of them in a responsible manner.
That is part of the job that lies before me, as I am getting ready to go to India to help bring about the next level of the deinstitutionalisation process.
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