Private orphanages resist Supreme Court rule

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Private orphanages, mostly in North Kerala, are engaged in a last ditch effort to somehow resist the Supreme Court directive to register under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015. They have been asked to register before March 31. Already 150 private orphanages have shut down, and nearly 500 have served notice to the state government saying that it was not feasible to run orphanages under a new set of stricter guidelines.

Government officials, however, brushed aside concerns of a mass shut down of private orphanages. “It is just a pressure tactic,” a top Social Justice Department official said. These orphanages, nearly 2,300 registered ones lodging nearly 30,000 children below the age of 18, are now governed by the Orphanages and Other Charitable Homes (Supervision and Control) Act, 1960, which keeps them out of control of monitoring agencies and imposes virtually no conditions of care and protection on them.

“The JJ Act prescribes certain inmate-teacher and inmate-caretaker ratios that will be impossible for private orphanages to adhere to,” said M. Ummer, Muslim League MLA who is also the general secretary of the orphanage Darunnajath Islamic Centre at Karuvarakkundu in Malappuram.  “Such stipulations are needless as students are present in the orphanages only in the mornings and evenings. Like any other kid, they go out to attend a school. The orphanage thus functions like a boarding school where it would be silly to have one teacher for every two inmates,” Mr Ummer said.

Mukkath Safarullah, who runs an orphanage in Kozhikode, said that his concern, beside the student-teacher ratio, was that the admission process would now be externally controlled, by the Child Welfare Committee. “We will have no say in the kind of children we take in,” Mr Safarullah said. But this is also the biggest charge against private orphanages. “They shut their doors on children with even the slightest disability,” a social justice official said.

Mr Ummer also served a veiled threat. “If private orphanages shut shop, the state government will have to take care of the 30,000-odd children who will be left out on the road. This would cost the state an annual outgo of Rs 500 crore,” he said. However, government officials are not unduly worried. “Most private trusts have invested so much in these orphanages that it is virtually impossible for them to shut down,” an official said. Instead, he said the JJ Act would revolutionise its functioning. “We have had instances where children were summarily kicked out of orphanages. There were also cases where children were sent on leave and then told not to come back. Such arbitrary practices will cease,” the official said.