Adoption in India : Policies and Experiences   Dr. Vinita Bhargava (2005)   Vineeta Bhargava’s book, is a pioneering study on child adoption in India.   Challenging some of the prevailing theories on adoptive parenting through   empirical data, it examines the issues that impinge on the development of   adopted children in India. Importantly, perhaps, for the first time the book   gives space to the voices of children.

The book is divided into two sections. The first deals with the macro-level issues of child adoption and discusses:

  - Historical and global perspectives concerning adoption;

  - Theoretical paradigms, problems of research design and evaluation of research outcomes in adoption studies; and

  - The Indian socio-political and socio-cultural contexts and contemporary adoption practices.


The second section provides a micro-level analysis of individual families and highlights:

  - The issues that come up while researching adoption in the Indian context; and

  - Experiences of parents and children, which have been collated to facilitate an understanding of the phenomenon of
    adoption at various stages of the child's development.


The book effectively combines both macro and micro issues with qualitative and quantitative methodologies to give a comprehensive construal of adoption. The life-cycle approach (which helps to map the continuities and transformations in the behaviour of adopted children), ethnographic studies of adoptive families and the author's personal story as an adoptive parent have been combined to provide the reader with an empathetic understanding of the adoptive parent and child.

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