India needs laws to protect its abandoned infants 

By Vidyadhar Prabhudesai 

Summary: Recent cases of infants abandoned in Haryana, Karnataka and Jharkhand expose a legal system built for children who can speak, not infants who cannot. Strict criminal penalties for abandonment push parents away from the safe, confidential surrender option the law already provides, while fragmented data and a slow adoption pipeline compound the damage. A dedicated Infant Protection Act, modelled in part on safe haven laws and baby hatches used abroad, would make prevention, investigation, data collection and adoption reform statutory duties rather than voluntary charity. 

In July 2025, a woman in Haryana’s Kaithal district allegedly suffocated her newborn and hid the body in cattle shed. In April 2025, police in Bengaluru found a stillborn infant dumped in a garbage bag after a minor gave birth in secret. In April 2026, villagers near Dumka, Jharkhand, rescued a baby abandoned in a sack by a forest road. These are not isolated horrors. They are symptoms of a legal system that treats an infant’s (0-12 months) survival as an afterthought. 

India’s child protection laws, including the Juvenile Justice Act, were built to shield children who can run, speak or identify an abuser. They offer almost nothing designed specifically for an infant, whose survival depends on the first few hours after birth. Worse, the criminal law that runs alongside them, Section 93 of the Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita, punishes abandonment with up to seven years in prison, a threat that drives desperate parents toward secrecy rather than help, even though the law also quietly offers a safer alternative that almost nobody uses. 

India needs a dedicated Infant Protection Act: one that decriminalizes safe surrender, mandates rescue protocols, unifies the country’s fragmented data on abandoned infants, and fixes an adoption pipeline that lets rescued babies age out of adoptability while the paperwork catches up. This piece traces why India’s current laws fail infants, the human cost of that failure, what other countries have done differently and what a workable Infant Protection Act would look like. 

A preventable, recurring pattern 

The cases above are not isolated tragedies. They are representative of a systemic collapse repeating across slums, villages and city outskirts alike. The bias behind them runs deeper than geography: up to 90% of India’s abandoned infants are girls, a pattern researcher has traced for more than a decade to son preference and dowry-related anxiety. 

When infants turn up in garbage dumps, drains and forests, it proves that India’s protective framework is not merely cracked, it is largely absent. Every infant deserves the right to life, protection, dignity and justice, yet across India, infants continue to be abandoned, killed, trafficked or left without protection. 

The invisible crime 

Part of the reason this pattern persists is that no one is fully counting it. India’s infant abandonment problem is an invisible crime. Fragmented reporting and bureaucratic gaps bury its true scale beneath the headlines we do see. Three government systems each capture a different slice of the picture, and none captures the whole of it. 

— Police and the National Crime Records Bureau. These bodies register only the cases that reach a police station. They rarely count infants who do not survive unsafe, illegal abortions, since these babies are often never registered as having lived at all. 

— The health system. It meets nearly every birth in India, yet it lacks an integrated mechanism to track infants who disappear from facilities or are abandoned nearby. 

— The Ministry of Women and Child Development. It monitors children already inside institutional care but has no tool to count the infants still in the field, those found in rivers, toilets or open ground before anyone can reach them. 

Without a single national database, policymakers govern in the dark. Team PaaLoNaa, an Indian initiative that tracks infanticide and abandonment cases, argues that official NCRB and adoption-authority figures understate the problem and that its own state-by-state data tells a different story. 

Why general child protection laws fail infants 

This one-size-fits-all approach starts with the law itself. India’s existing child protection laws, including the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, were drafted for children who can run, scream or eventually identify an abuser. An infant has no such agency; its survival depends entirely on a ticking clock and the immediate intervention of public institutions. 

Current laws are fundamentally reactive. They wait for a crime to be reported or a victim to be found. Infant protection instead requires a proactive framework. Because an infant cannot testify or seek help, the state must carry a higher burden of proof and fund specialized forensic investigation. General laws treat abandonment as a welfare issue; a dedicated Infant Protection Act would treat it as a core governance responsibility, one that mandates the state bridge the gap between discovery and dignity. 

This threat is not abstract. Section 93 of the Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita, the law that replaced the Indian Penal Code, defines exposure and abandonment as a criminal act, not a plea for help. Faced with that framing, parents in crisis, often unwed mothers under severe social stigma, rarely walk into a police station or hospital. Instead, they conceal the birth and leave the infant in a field, a garbage dump or a railway station, hoping a stranger finds the child in time. Child rights advocates call this the trash-can paradox: the harsher the deterrent against abandonment, the more secretive and dangerous it becomes. 

That safer alternative is Safe Surrender, a provision of the Juvenile Justice Act that lets a parent hand an infant to a district Child Welfare Committee in confidence, with no First Information Report registered against a biological parent during the inquiry that follows. Yet the National Crime Records Bureau logged 709 criminal cases of child exposure and abandonment in 2021 alone, evidence that this safer path remains little used. Low public awareness and a deep distrust of authorities keep parents from ever learning the option exists before panic sets in. 

Two infants, two very different fates 

Even when an infant survives abandonment and is rescued, the legal framework built around that rescue can trap the child in institutional limbo for years. The law treats an infant who is found abandoned very differently from one who is safely surrendered, and the gap between the two tracks often decides whether the child ever finds a permanent home. 

Feature	Abandoned Infant	Legally Surrendered Infant
Legal status	Treated as a potential crime scene. Triggers police reporting and a search for the biological parents. Abandonment is an offence under BNS Section 93 (exposure and abandonment of a child under twelve years by a parent or person having care of the child; punishable with imprisonment up to 7 years, or fine, or both). Note: The JJ Act still provides that no FIR shall be registered against any biological parent merely in the process of inquiry relating to an abandoned or surrendered child.	A formal relinquishment of parental rights before the Child Welfare Committee (CWC). No police investigation follows.
Time to clear for adoption	Statutory outer limit: must be declared legally free within two months (child up to 2 years) or four months (above 2 years) from production before the CWC, after due inquiry and tracing efforts. In practice, delays in police reports, publication, and coordination often extend this to many months.	Parents get a fixed two-month reconsideration period from the date of the surrender deed. Once it expires without reclaim, the CWC must declare the child legally free for adoption.
Adoption prospects	The child risks aging out of the highly preferred 0–2 age bracket while the case is pending, reducing chances of timely placement.	The child enters the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) / CARINGS system as an infant, when adoption prospects are highest.

Because the law spends months tracing biological parents who often cannot be found, babies wait in crowded Child Care Institutions. By the time the paperwork clears, many are no longer infants, and their odds of adoption fall sharply, since most prospective parents prefer children under two years old. 

Lessons from safe haven laws abroad 

India still treats a parent in crisis as a criminal first and a human being second. International models offer a more humane, life-saving alternative. Every US state now runs a Safe Haven law that lets a parent surrender an unharmed infant anonymously at a hospital, fire station or police post, without facing prosecution for abandonment. 

Germany’s baby hatches, or Babyklappen, work on a similar principle: a temperature-controlled hatch alerts staff the moment a parent leaves an infant, and the parent can walk away unseen. These structures are not an encouragement to abandon a child; they are an emergency exit that heads off the unsafe abandonment India sees today. Shifting the focus from punishment to preservation ensures that a crisis for the parent does not become a death sentence for the child. 

A roadmap for an Infant Protection Act 

India needs a law that moves the state’s role from voluntary charity to a statutory obligation. This roadmap rests on four pillars. 

— Prevention and rescue. Decriminalize the act of leaving an infant at a designated medical facility, and scale up confidential cradle schemes at every district hospital, backed by standardized national rescue protocols with mandatory response timelines that treat every abandoned infant as a medical and legal emergency. 

— Investigation and forensics. End the era of the un-investigated death by mandating FIR registration for every infant-related incident and rigorous forensic and medical examination protocols, so that justice reaches even those who never had a name.  

— Data and accountability. Build a unified national data system that bridges the police, health and Women and Child Development departments, ensuring transparency and rehabilitation support for the survivors of this collective neglect. Enable Aadhar enabled tracking mechanism from pregnancy till child birth by making it mandatory.  

— Adoption-pipeline reform. Streamline Child Welfare Committee clearances so that infants who survive abandonment do not age out of the 0–2 preference bracket before prospective parents can adopt them. 

Standardizing these protocols would transform infant protection from a fragmented, charitable initiative into a core governance responsibility. 

A dedicated Infant Protection Act would rank among the most transformative steps in the history of Indian social policy. It offers a vision of an India where the most vulnerable are no longer the most ignored. Strengthening accountability and rescue mechanisms would move the country toward a future where the right to life is a reality from the very first breath. India must decide what kind of nation it wants to be: one that looks away from the garbage dump, or one that builds a sanctuary. No infant should ever be abandoned, killed, trafficked, neglected or denied dignity. Every infant deserves protection from the very first moment of life.