Every year, somewhere in India, a child in institutional care turns 15 and becomes too old for the adoption system. Not because no family wanted them, but because the institution housing them was never registered with the adoption authority, or no licensed agency operated in their district, or the paperwork moved too slowly through an understaffed Child Welfare Committee.
The information needed to fix this exists. The Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA), the government body that regulates all legal adoption in India, publishes a detailed statistical table every year, recording the number of children adopted in each state, broken down by type (in or out-of-country adoption) and gender. Their records go back to 2013–14. It’s a 12-year account of which children found families and which did not, state by state, year by year. That data has, to our knowledge, informed fewer than a handful of policy papers and never once shaped a state government adoption strategy or a Union Budget allocation. This analysis reads it systematically for the first time, to find where the gaps are, understand why they persist, and identify what it would take to close them.A record year and what made it
In 2024–2025, India recorded 4,155 in-country adoptions: the highest figure in 12 years. This was a 24 per cent increase over the pre-COVID baseline of 3,351 in 2019–20, and it did not happen passively. Two specific interventions drove the result.
