Many cases of child abandonment fail to make it to government records’

Two cases of new-borns being found abandoned and rescued were reported here in a week. Both babies were rescued by the police and Childline Lucknow and placed in the care of government shelter homes in the city. One of them was a few days old and the other 8 months. Four new-borns, all girls, have been rescued in the state this year after abandonment, as per Childline.

“These are only the cases that are reported, there are many more that go unnoticed and do not make it to the government records,” said Sangeeta Sharma, director of Childline, Lucknow.

The data on abandoned children is scattered and unreliable. From 2017 to 2019, UP recorded 424 cases of abandoned infants. There were 740 abandoned children in 2021 countrywide, of which two were from UP, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data. The ‘Bal Swaraj’ portal set up by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights recorded 492 cases since April 2020. As per Childline, 9 abandoned new-borns were rescued in Lucknow alone in 2021. “We get nearly 40-50 cases yearly,” said Asiya Raza, social worker with Rajkiya Bal Griha (Shishu) who looks after adoption procedures at the shelter.