The government has taken a firm new stance on the running of children’s shelters by sharpening its child protection laws. This follows a series of abuse cases that have made lurid headlines in the past few months.

“Abuse abounds in child care institutions, though scores of cases go unreported,” says lawyer Asha Bajpai, who heads a state committee formed by the Bombay High Court to study child abuse.

Violations have been widespread throughout the country’s 650 shelters, which house more than 30,000 children. One recent investigation revealed the multiple molestation of girls by the director of Apna Ghar - Our Home – in the Rohtak district of Haryana state, northern India. It was reported that his activities were abetted and shared by local police officials. The home has now been sealed and is being probed by the Central Bureau of Investigation.

Elsewhere, a young girl died after being raped in a government-run orphanage in Delhi last December. A further three rapes were reported at a shelter in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, while a number of mentally challenged children were rape victims in an orphanage in the western state of Maharashtra.

“In almost every state, the courts are now being flooded with cases in shelter homes and orphanages,” says Anant Kumar Asthana, a child rights activist and lawyer .

Asthana believes that the abuses were so rampant because the law was insufficiently stringent, and there has been no formalized system for monitoring and inspecting the shelters.

“But the amended Juvenile Justice Act, which is the principal legislation that governs child care institutions, now has more teeth to fight the violations,” says Asthana.

However, there are concerns that in response to intense criticism from the media and the public, some local authorities may be overreacting.

“They recently went to one of our shelter homes in Dharuhera Gurgaon,” says Sister Ann Moyalan of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth.

“When they found nothing abnormal, they pulled us up for having only 22 of a possible 65 children present. We told them the others were on holiday, but they refused to listen and took away our children. However, they later sent them back.”

Sister Beena Chirackal, in charge of the day-to-day running of the shelter, adds: “They are asking us to keep a dossier of every little thing that happens in the home.  Every time the car goes out, it has to be entered in the log. It means we have to divert our attention away from looking after the children.”

Bernie David, an American national who runs a shelter in Mumbai, says she too is suffering as a result of the tighter new laws.

“We’ve had to send back 27 children whose mothers are prostitutes because we can’t afford the registration,” she says.

“We can’t fulfill the requirement that you have to own the property – property in Mumbai is very expensive – and we can’t maintain the bank balance of 200,000 rupees that the new rules stipulate.”

Archbishop Vincent Concessao of Delhi says: “The government has failed to help poor children, and now it's preventing charitable organizations from helping them.

“The archdiocese runs 13 childcare homes and we plan to submit memoranda to the chief ministers of Delhi and Haryana about this,” he said.

While welcoming the new legislation, Anant Kumar Asthana agrees that it is not a perfect solution. “The government will have to revise its grant structure and help NGOs,” he says, “or it will have to make its own arrangements to look after hundreds of orphans and destitutes.”