Patna

need any special policy or certificate, if they are adopted by well off parents or foster families?”

Successes

a) Few young adults interviewed in Patna spoke about receiving birth and caste certificates through agents within a month by furnishing only Aadhaar card and a fee of Rs. 500 per application.

Challenges

a) Main challenge faced by the staff of Rainbow Homes was lack of uniform fee for registration of birth across the state of Bihar. Although the Government has laid down process and the Act specifies fee for birth registration including late registration charges but many intermediaries are involved in the processes who mislead the applicants. The

Birth Certificate Registrations for the interviewed YAs have been done through parents who were un-aware about the process while applying. Also, since most of parents did not had proof of birth, the applications were routed through agents, who charged arbitrary amounts taking advantage of their lack of awareness. One of the girls could not get original copy of birth certificate from the agent who charged high amount and provided only the photocopy of the certificate. In another case, Birth Certificate was not received by a girl because it required Aadhar card and there was an error in her Aadhar card. This error correction in Aadhar required Domicile certificate/ parental proof again required

Aadhar card. Hence, the girl was stuck in a loop with no assistance for an alternative by the officials. b) Accessing certificates from Block Development Offices in Bihar posed challenges for parents of young adults as well as staff members responsible to access identity documents for Rainbow’s children. According to the staff, “queues are very long and parents/ guardians often have to undertake many trips to the office to submit documents”. Staff at

Rainbow Homes also faced problem since Block officials refused to make certificates for more than two children at a time from one applicant. According to the YAs, sometimes agents come to villages claiming that they can make the caste or domicile certificates within 8-10 days with a fee but, since there is no assurance of their services and the fee charged is arbitrary, most of YAs do not rely on these agents. c) As majority of parents are non-literate, Aadhar forms of children were filled by other people at a price. Parents of YAs who were interviewed for the study have availed Aadhar cards of their wards but to get this the parents had to pay between Rs.100-400/- per card.