On a flight from Mumbai to Delhi last week, this writer happened to sit next to a young couple who became parents for the first time in the pandemic. During the small-talk that followed, they revealed that the baby wasn’t their biological offspring. After unsuccessfully trying to conceive for six years, they got “lucky” when their friend’s sister-in-law, who couldn’t afford to raise her third child, sought a home for her son. “After much consideration, we took her baby boy,” the mother shared. The couple hadn’t even given adoption or surrogacy a thought, because of how “tedious the process has become”.

With adoption in India being routed by the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) and the government recently notifying new laws to regulate surrogacy and assisted reproductive technology, several Indian couples are deferring their dreams to become parents. Experts, however, fear that many desperate couples might go the illegal way.