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. This piece traces all three and makes the case for pulling whichever lever moves fastest.
In July 2025, a woman in Haryana’s Kaithal district allegedly suffocated her newborn and hid the body in a cattle shed. In April 2025, police in Bengaluru found a stillborn infant dumped in a garbage bag. In April 2026, villagers near Dumka, Jharkhand, rescued a baby abandoned in a sack by a forest road. None of these cases has been debated on the floor of Parliament. As far as public legislative records show, no bill dedicated specifically to infant abandonment has ever been introduced in India’s Parliament at all.
That silence is not because there is no lever to pull. India’s political and legal system offers at least three real paths to force this issue into the open: a Zero Hour intervention in a legislature, a Private Member’s Bill in Parliament, and a Public Interest Litigation before a High Court or the Supreme Court. One of these has already happened, at the state level. This piece traces all three, what each has achieved before on child welfare specifically, and makes the case for pulling whichever lever moves fastest.
A crisis with no seat at the table
Part of why this issue has never reached Parliament is that no single institution tracks it. Police and the National Crime Records Bureau register only cases that reach a police station. The health system meets nearly every birth in India, but has no mechanism to track infants who disappear from its own facilities. The Ministry of Women and Child Development monitors children already inside institutional care, but has no tool to count the infants still in the field. Team PaaLoNaa, an independent initiative that tracks infanticide and abandonment cases, argues that official figures understate the problem badly. Without a single agency owning the data, no minister has ever had a reason to bring the subject to the House, and no opposition MP has had the ammunition to force the question.
Path one: forcing it onto the floor
The fastest and lowest-bar option is procedural. A Zero Hour intervention lets any MLA or MP raise an urgent public matter without the months’ notice a formal question requires, simply by catching the Speaker’s attention when the House convenes. This is not hypothetical for infant protection. During Jharkhand’s Budget Session in March 2025, Nirsa MLA Arup Chatterjee raised the issue of infant murder and unsafe abandonment directly on the floor of the Jharkhand Legislative Assembly, presenting data from the PaaLoNaa campaign and urging the Jharkhand government to move toward a dedicated Infant Protection Act.
PaaLoNaa has tracked infanticide and unsafe abandonment since 2015. The organization publicly thanked Chatterjee for bringing the issue into the Assembly, precisely because so few legislators ever had. That is the value of this path: it costs a legislator almost nothing procedurally to raise the alarm, and it is the only one of the three paths that has already happened for this exact issue. The obvious next step is the same intervention, repeated in India’s Parliament.
Path two: a private member’s bill
Skeptics of the private member route should look at India’s own legislative history. Since 1952, only 14 Private Member’s Bills have ever become law, and two of them addressed almost exactly this problem. In 1954, Rajmata Kamlendu Mati Shah introduced the Women’s and Children’s Institutions (Licensing) Bill in the Lok Sabha; it became law in 1956 and required any institution housing women or children to hold a state license. In 1960, Kailash Bihari Lall took the Orphanages and Other Charitable Homes (Supervision and Control) Bill further in the Rajya Sabha, replacing the 1956 Act with a full state Board of Control and a recognition system for every child-care institution.
The strongest recent precedent is more modern. In 2014, DMK MP Tiruchi Siva introduced the Rights of Transgender Persons Bill in the Rajya Sabha, forced a formal division after ministers tried to get him to withdraw it, and in April 2015, it passed unanimously, the first Private Member’s Bill to clear any House of Parliament in 36 years. It never became law; the government moved its own, weaker bill instead. But it forced a subject that the government wanted to defer to the public record, and gave advocates a stronger benchmark against which to hold the eventual law. That is the realistic, achievable outcome for an Infant Protection Bill, too: not a certain passage, but a forced reckoning.
Path three: a public interest litigation
The third path does not need a legislature at all. Under Articles 32 and 226 of the Constitution, any citizen or organization, not just someone directly harmed, can petition the Supreme Court or a High Court on a matter of public interest, and courts can act on a news report without even being asked. Indian courts have previously used this power to establish binding rules. At the same time, Parliament was slow to act: in Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan (1997), the Supreme Court issued interim guidelines against workplace sexual harassment that stood as the law of the land for 16 years, until Parliament finally passed the POSH Act in 2013.
This is not a hypothetical fit for infant abandonment. In 2021, Dr. Piyush Saxena filed a Supreme Court writ petition seeking to simplify India’s adoption process, arguing that a system built on tracing biological parents makes no sense for a child abandoned in what his petition bluntly calls a heap of garbage, since that parent is the least likely person ever to return and claim the child. And in 2026, the Punjab and Haryana High Court took up a public interest litigation after a five-month-old was allegedly sold by drug-addicted parents in the Mansa district, ordering the state to report on the child’s custody and welfare. Courts are already circling this exact problem, case by case. A PIL asking for binding interim directions, mandatory cradle schemes, public Safe Surrender awareness campaigns, and a unified national data system, while Parliament works out a full Act, could move faster than either legislative path.
Why can’t this wait for just one path?
Section 93 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita punishes abandonment with up to seven years in prison, even though the Juvenile Justice Act already offers parents a safer, confidential Safe Surrender option that almost nobody knows exists. The National Crime Records Bureau logged 709 criminal cases of child exposure and abandonment in 2021 alone, and researchers estimate up to 90% of India’s abandoned infants are girls, a pattern tied to son preference and dowry-related anxiety. These two laws work directly against each other, and no ministry has an incentive to notice, because no single ministry owns the whole problem.
This is precisely the kind of contradiction that a floor debate, a bill’s drafting process, or a court’s scrutiny exists to expose. Whichever path moves first, the contradiction becomes impossible to defend once it is on the record.
What it should contain
Whichever path moves first, a floor intervention, a bill, or a court order, the substance should rest on four pillars, each borrowing from precedent that Parliament and the courts have already tested.
— Prevention and rescue. Decriminalize the act of leaving an infant at a designated medical facility, and scale up confidential cradle schemes at every district hospital, backed by standardized national rescue protocols.
— Investigation and forensics. Mandate FIR registration and rigorous forensic protocols for every infant-related incident, so that justice reaches even those who never had a name.
— Data and accountability. Build a unified national data system bridging police, health, and Women and Child Development records, closing the gap that has kept this issue off the public agenda. Enable Aadhaar-based tracking from pregnancy through childbirth by making it mandatory.
— Adoption-pipeline reform. Streamline Child Welfare Committee clearances so infants who survive abandonment do not age out of the 0–2 preference bracket before they can be adopted.
None of this requires new legal imagination, only the will to reuse tools India has already built and proven, through its legislatures and its courts alike.
Every one of India’s 14 successful Private Member’s Bills required exactly one MP willing to introduce it. Every effective PIL required one citizen willing to file it. Every Zero Hour intervention required one legislator willing to stand up. Rajmata Kamlendu Mati Shah did it for children’s institutions in 1954. Kailash Bihari Lall did it again in 1960. Tiruchi Siva forced a full House to vote in 2015. Dr. Piyush Saxena took the adoption bureaucracy to the Supreme Court in 2021. Arup Chatterjee raised the alarm in the Jharkhand Assembly in 2025. India’s abandoned infants are waiting for the next name on that list, whether it belongs to a legislator, an MP, or a citizen with a lawyer and a cause. Readers can add their voice via the Infant Protection Act petition, and by asking their own MLA, MP, or local advocate a simple question: Which of these three paths will you take?
Author Bio: Vidyadhar Prabhudesai is an Indian entrepreneur and social-impact advocate. He co-founded LeadCap Ventures, which has worked with the United Nations, World Bank, World Economic Forum, and governments across Asia, Africa, and Europe. He is also co-founder of the Adopt India movement, which champions adoption reform for orphaned and abandoned children, and he campaigns for India’s proposed Infant Protection Act. Prabhudesai is the founding curator of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community and a former youth consultant to the Asian Development Bank. He holds fellowships from the US Department of State,
the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the Ford Foundation, the Royal Society of Arts, and the Commonwealth Foundation. He is an alumnus of Thunderbird School of Global Management. Vidyadhar received Thane Gaurav, the second-highest civilian award by Thane Municipal Corporation, and the World Bank’s Prize for impacting more than 10 million youth across India.
Clear Cut Child Protection Desk
New Delhi, UPDATED: September 02, 2026 15:00 IST
Written By: Vidyadhar Prabhudesai
