CARA referral gives no right to adopt, Delhi HC rules, flags adoption lapses

The Delhi High Court has turned down a Singapore-based couple's plea to adopt a baby girl who had been referred to them by the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA), ruling that a referral by the adoption body does not give prospective parents a legal right to adopt. In a judgment reported on 17 October 2026, Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma held that the couple, who had a second biological son after registering to adopt, had become ineligible for a child in the normal category, and that CARA's referral of the infant to them should not have happened. The court also found serious lapses in the way CARA handled the case and ordered it to verify eligibility before making any referral, audit profiles affected by its portal migration, keep to its timelines for no-objection certificates, and move at once to place the child, identified as Baby K, with a family in accordance with the law.

For families hoping to adopt, the ruling sets out a hard but clear principle: the adoption system is built around the child's interest, and the rules on who may adopt which child apply even when a family has already formed a bond. The couple had accepted the referral and had come to see the baby as theirs. The court recognised their distress but said that feeling could not override the eligibility criteria.

At the same time, the judgment is a strong criticism of the process that put the family in that position. The referral should never have been made if the couple was no longer eligible. A portal error then recorded an application as withdrawn without the applicant's consent. For the child, these lapses meant months of uncertainty about where she would grow up. That is why the court's directions focus on CARA checking eligibility at the very start, cleaning up records affected by its move to a new portal, and meeting its own timelines.

The point about "hard to place" children matters too. Adoption rules treat children classed as hard to place differently from children in the normal category. The court said a child cannot be moved into that category simply because paperwork or litigation took time, a safeguard that stops delays from being used to get around the normal rules.

For prospective parents, the practical lessons are to keep their registration details up to date when their family changes, to check what their category of eligibility is after such a change, and to understand that a referral is a step in the process, not a final decision.

Short-term: CARA must act immediately to place Baby K with an eligible family. It also has to begin checking eligibility before referrals and auditing profiles affected by the portal migration.

Long-term: If CARA follows the directions, fewer families should face the pain of a referral that is later withdrawn, and children should spend less time waiting in uncertainty. The ruling also gives other courts a clear statement on what a referral does and does not mean.

Who is affected: Children waiting for adoption, including Baby K; Indian and overseas families registered to adopt; specialised adoption agencies; and CARA itself, which runs India's adoption system under the Ministry of Women and Child Development.

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