BusinessWhen festival marketing punches down on India’s most vulnerable children and families

No bill dedicated to infant abandonment has ever reached Parliament, but India already has three real levers to force the issue into the open: a Zero Hour intervention, already used once at the state level; a Private Member’s Bill, the same mechanism that built India’s child-institution law twice before; and a Public Interest Litigation, the tool that gave India binding interim law on workplace harassment for 16 years before Parliament acted. My article traces all three...

India needs a dedicated Infant Protection Act because Section 93 of the BNS criminalizes abandonment as a crime rather than a plea for help, creating a "trash-can paradox" where unwed mothers and parents in crisis hide births and dump infants in fields/garbage dumps/railway stations instead of seeking help; while the Juvenile Justice Act offers a safer alternative of Safe Surrender to the Child Welfare Committee with no FIR, it is barely used (709 criminal abandonment cases in 2021 alone) due...