Why a Kerala woman was arrested for abandoning her baby, despite ‘cradle baby scheme’

The cradle baby scheme was first started in Tamil Nadu, and there are different versions of it in effect across the country.

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On October 28, children coming to a madrassa in Thiruvannur in Kozhikode, Kerala found something odd. Around 8.30 am, they noticed along with the slippers outside the mosque, a small bundle. It turned out to be a baby girl – just four days old. There was a note too: “Please name the child as you wish. Please look after this infant considering her a gift from Allah. We are giving back what Allah gave us, to his abode. Do give the child BCG, Polio and Hepatitis B vaccination.”

A week since, the mother of the child has been identified – a 21-year-old woman, reportedly unmarried – and has been arrested. “The baby was shifted to a hospital for a few days, and once it was determined that she was in good health, we moved her to a government run home,” a source from the Kozhikode Child Welfare Committee told TNM.

But in a country where ‘cradle baby schemes’ exist – where the government promises to care for abandoned children and provides for mechanisms for parents who are unable to care for their children, why was the young woman arrested? And are such arrests common?

The answer, according to Child Welfare officials that TNM spoke to, lies in the manner in which parents choose to give up their children.

“Whenever a child is abandoned, an FIR is registered by the police to find out why it happened. In some cases, the parents would have abandoned the baby and in others, the child would have been kidnapped and abandoned. We have had cases where the father would not want a girl and the mother abandons the baby as she lacks the means to raise her. In such an instance, a case has to be registered against the father which is why an FIR is crucial,” says a source from the Child Welfare Committee (CWC) in Kerala – a body constituted by the state government in every district under the Juvenile Justice Act.

The source explains that an FIR is registered even when a child is abandoned in official cradle baby reception centres. However, it is only when the baby is dropped off at places that risk the child’s health or life that action is taken against the person who abandons the child, the source adds.

“For instance, in the case of the 21-year-old mother in Kozhikode, she probably knows the child would be found and handed over to the authorities and hence it is safe to keep her in front of the mosque. But it is not a designated cradle, and hence placing the child there poses a risk to her health and life. She could have been bitten by a stray dog or not been discovered at all,” the source explains.

“Besides, when you leave the child in a public place, anybody is free to take the child and raise it illegally without informing the CWC. The safest thing to do is to surrender the child to the CWC,” they add.

Once a case is closed, the child is legally free for adoption and is declared as such. Until then, he or she is kept under the care of the state at government run foundling homes. “When a case is registered, the process is more streamlined and the children can be declared legally free for adoption once the investigations are over and the case is closed,” the source adds.

However, it is important to note that Kozhikode – where the baby was abandoned in the current case – does not have a designated cradle baby reception centre under the state government’s Ammathottil scheme. In this case however, the woman hails from Thrissur and the man from Malappuram, two districts where there are cradle baby reception centres.

Cradle baby schemes in India

The abandonment of infants, especially girls, is a story that’s not too uncommon in India, a country where preference for the male child is quite socially entrenched.

In 1992, the then Jayalalithaa-led government in Tamil Nadu took cognizance of female infanticide in the state, and put in place the cradle baby scheme which allowed for parents/guardians to safely relinquish an unwanted child anonymously in designated cradle baby reception centres. This debuted in Tamil Nadu’s Salem district 27 years ago. In 2001, the Cradle Baby Scheme was extended to other districts in the state – Madurai, Theni, Dindigul, and Dharmapuri – and now operates in many more districts.

Further, under the union government’s Integrated Child Protection Scheme (ICPS), every district is mandated to have a cradle baby reception centre. As per the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA), these reception centres aim to “rescue the abandoned children and look after them with due care and affection till he/she is given in adoption.”

Each Specialised Adoption Agency (SAA), which is mandated by CARA to set up these cradle reception centres, are supposed to install a cradle at their doorstep to receive such babies.

“These Cradle Baby Reception Centres will be linked to Cradle Points at Primary Health Care Centres (PHCs), Hospitals/Nursing Homes, Swadhar Units, Short Stay Homes and in the office of the DCPU (District Child Protection Unit) to receive abandoned babies. For every child received by the cradle baby reception centre, the process of creating an individual care plan shall be initiated by the reception centre, to be further developed and prepared by the SAA in whose care the child is to be transferred after the authorization of the CWC,” CARA says.

As of 2017, these cradle baby reception centres had been set up in 11 states including Haryana, Assam, Gujaratm Karnataka, West Bengal and Manipur, among others, at 265 locations. 205 infants had been found in these cradles then. Then Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi had said that all states had been asked to set up these cradles “preferably at Primary Health Centres, Hospitals, Nursing Homes, Swadhar Units, Short Stay Homes and the office of District Child Protection Unit.”

Like Tamil Nadu’s almost three-decade-old Cradle Baby Scheme, other states have also taken measures to implement the ICDS program.

Kerala, for example, has the ‘Ammathottil’ scheme since 2002, under which electronic cradles have been set up at certain places in all of the state’s districts except Kozhikode. The scheme functions under the Kerala State Council for Child Welfare, funded by the centre and aims to provide “better life conditions for the destitute, abandoned and relinquished children.”

Once the baby is placed in the cradle, an alarm goes off, alerting officials to collect the child. Last year, the Kerala government planned to double the number of Ammathottil centres from 14 to 30, and also upgrade them technologically. With this update, the cradles would be equipped with sensors that would send officials a text message and photo of the abandoned infant, and also record the baby’s weight at the time it is left there.

Criticism

While the governments’ aim with these schemes was to prevent the unsafe abandonment of the girl child, some say that the schemes have not really helped. For instance, a report from 2018 on Tamil Nadu’s Cradle Baby Scheme says that since the number of babies left in these cradles had been declining, it indicated an increase in sex selective abortions. Others have pointed out that these abandoned children face neglect in government centres, and also that there is little record of what happens to them once they are adopted.