India’s Covid orphans: What happens to children who lose their parents to the virus?

More than 230,000 people in India have now died with the coronavirus. These are not the only victims of the pandemic that is still devastating the country, however. Behind each number, there is another story of loss and devastation among loved ones who survived.

In Delhi, NGO workers tell The Independent, there is the case of a 14-year-old boy whose mother, father, grandfather and uncle all died from Covid-19. The teenager will now be brought up by his classmate’s family, who agreed to foster him.

With the country pounded by a second wave of the virus that appears to be increasingly affecting young people, there is a growing awareness of the haunting phenomenon of the “Covid orphan”, with activists, NGOs, and child rights workers fielding a deluge of calls every day about new cases. These are calls for help for children whose lives will never be the same, even after this wave is over and the world for most people returns to normal.

“The name and place changes but the soul-shattering stories of these young kids remain the same”, says Dhananjay Tingal, from Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kailash Satyarthi’s children’s foundation in India.

Tingal, director of Bachpan Bachao Andolan (the Save Childhood Movement), says that since the start of April, the organisation’s helpline has been receiving between 150 and 200 calls daily about children in need of urgent assistance, and 60 per cent of the calls are for children who have lost either one or both of their parents to Covid.

What has gone unnoticed amid the endless pleas online for hospital beds, oxygen, medicines and even space in overwhelmed crematorium grounds, are the equally desperate requests for breast milk for motherless infants.

At the same time, among the viral WhatsApp messages about questionable home remedies and unverified drug solutions, there are illicit messages, usually light on detail, asking people to adopt babies orphaned by the disease.

“For adoption: if anyone wished to adopt a girl please feel free to call … One girl is three days old and another is six months old. They have lost their parents due to Covid. Please help these kids get a new life. Spread the word,” reads one of the many heart-rending messages doing the rounds in the past few weeks.

What we know is that, where they are genuine, these appeals represent just a small fraction of all the cases in reality, says Anurag Kundu, chair of the Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights (DCPCR), a Delhi government body.

He says that so far there have been 11 confirmed cases handled by the DCPCR where a child has lost either one parent or both to Covid, and the number is increasing with each passing day. Taking this as only an indicator, he tells The Independent that the true number of orphans in Delhi must be “staggeringly large”, as the vast majority would not know about the helplines or channels to follow to get the commission’s help.

Two panicked and anxious children dialled the SOS helpline late at night on 24 April as they sat beside the bodies of their mother and father, not knowing what to do, Kundu recalls. They asked how they should go about cremating their parents.

“I cannot imagine the horror, and I am at a loss of words to even think that small kids are facing the questions of [how to] cremate mother and father. It not only shatters their world but raises large questions about how they are going to grow,” he said.

It is an agony that has been shared by many as the virus has besieged the country. India has reported more than 300,000 new Covid cases daily for the past 15 days, accounting for almost half of all the world’s cases in the past week, according to World Health Organisation figures. Even these huge figures are considered a major understatement, given the scale of under-reporting in the country.

In another case, three children from one family – including two minors and one who was 18 years old – were left to fend for themselves after both their parents died. They called the helpline in extreme distress after the children themselves had also tested positive for the virus and were in need of immediate medical attention.

They will now live on the assistance provided by a family who came forward to the commission and offered to financially support the children. “DCPCR is closely monitoring the case and is working towards ensuring their rehabilitation, wellbeing and safety,” Kundu says.

Early data suggests that the new variant of Covid in India is hitting young patients harder. In Delhi, 65 per cent of Covid-19 patients are below the age of 45 – the cohort most likely to include young parents, and which has only just been been given access to vaccinations, from 1 May.

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The NGO workers note that no official records are being kept of the number of Covid orphans. Indeed, their loss might never be acknowledged, with the country already struggling simply to count overall deaths from the virus.

However, concerns are mounting that the pandemic will fuel child rights violations as orphans are exploited and the situation is made worse by those illegally offering children up for adoption on social media.

Sonal Kapoor, founder of the Protsahan India Foundation, an NGO that works across 48 slums in Delhi, says the pandemic is exposing children to the horrors of sexual exploitation, incest and child trafficking. These are the sorts of cases she has been witnessing since the start of the pandemic.

“We have been listening to endless heartbreaking tales since last year, but the severity has increased manyfold this time [with the second wave],” she says.

She says that child traffickers are more active than ever, waiting to take advantage of moments of humanitarian crisis.

“Putting children’s numbers up on social media for adoption would wreak havoc,” says Kapoor, arguing that even the most well-intentioned amateur volunteer does not have the experience or infrastructure to arrange such adoptions safely. “The traffickers come to adopt children all dressed up as nice couples ready to adopt,” she says.

Children in such cases are often mentally traumatised and extremely vulnerable, she says, citing as an example a call the foundation received from an inconsolable teenage boy after a hospital in Delhi refused to return the body of his father, who died from Covid. “Will I never get my father back?” the boy asked Kapoor.

“These children will never have closure, and many will end up living off the grid,” she says.

India’s second wave has seen people experiencing loss on a staggering scale, and for some the situation can seem utterly hopeless. In one case widely reported in the local media, two siblings were on the brink of suicide when they were rescued by Delhi Police. The two had lost both parents to Covid. The authorities eventually were able to arrange for them to travel to Guwahati in Assam state to be housed with relatives.

While there is infrastructure and a legal framework to help such children, “there is appallingly low awareness about the legal process and about how the system works,” says Smriti Gupta, of Where Are India’s Children (Waic).

She says there is more need than ever for the government to build such awareness, and that it is vital regardless of whether there is a pandemic.

Kundu says the first step when coming across a case of children who have lost their parents should be to either report the matter to Childline on 1098, a pan-India helpline, or to get in touch with the relevant state’s commission for child rights. For Delhi, the helpline is +91-9311551393.

“No NGO or person can put the child up for adoption. It can only be done by the district child welfare committee,” he adds.

According to the common sense principles laid out in India’s Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2015, nothing is better for a child than a familiar environment, Kundu explains.

He says the first priority in rehabilitating such children is always to find extended family members. “Because merely providing education, clothing, food and shelter are not equal to raising a child. It requires far more than essential services.”

The federal institutions come into the picture when both the parents have died or no one from the immediate family comes forward to help the child. It is done by bringing the child to the district child welfare committee (CWC), who then make a decision on its future, depending on various factors.

“We have initiated the institutionalisation process in two cases out of the 11 [handled recently due to Covid], as well as investigations against those who are putting up messages for adoption [online],” Kundu says.

Gupta concludes by saying that this is a time when “every single Indian should know that an abandoned or orphaned child needs to reach a specialised adoption agency. We shouldn’t be trading children in WhatsApp and Facebook messages. And we shouldn’t be leaving children in shelters for life.”