Children with disabilities and special needs seldom find families in India who adopt them. Within India, only 47 such children were adopted in 2017-18. It a very small number for such a big country, where we have around 25,000 parents waiting for more than 2 years to adopt a child under 2 years of age. Even children with correctable conditions are often ignored in the system.

Kalpana Jayashanker and her husband had adopted their daughter when she was 3 years old. Soon after adopting her, they realised that she was vision impaired. We spoke to Kalpana to understand how she navigated through the adoption and special needs landscape.