For Bhavani C. Gayak and her husband Chandrashekar, the wait for a child had lasted two decades. What finally brought that wait to an end was the transparent, seniority-based adoption system, and a team at Shishu Mandir that treated their file like it mattered.
A Four-Year Wait
Bhavani and Chandrashekar filed their adoption application on April 21, 2022. What followed was years of waiting inside India’s centralized adoption matching system — a queue based purely on seniority, with no room for favoritism or shortcuts.
At one point, the wait nearly broke their resolve. “We thought, no sir, please cancel it, we won’t have a child,” Bhavani recalls of a visit to Mr. Manjunath, a district official who had been guiding them through the process. He told them to wait. Their seniority number, once in the hundreds, was finally closing in on the top of the list.
It’s a moment that says as much about the system as it does about the couple: a case that could have dropped out of the queue instead stayed in it, because someone on the other end kept encouraging them to hold on.
On March 3, 2026, a notification arrived — a child was being listed as available for reservation. Bhavani forwarded it to her family. Within hours, they’d pulled up the child’s profile and photographs online.
“We said the baby is healthy, let’s reserve it,” Bhavani says. “From that day itself, I reserved the child.”
Days later, they traveled from Ranebennur to Bangalore to meet their daughter in person for the first time. “When I saw [her] for the first time, I was very, very happy,” Bhavani said. “The child is healthy, and she will suit us.”
Counseling, Patience, and the Shishu Mandir Team
What followed was a counseling session on March 20, a short wait back home, and finally, on March 27, the placement itself. Bhavani is quick to name the people who made that day possible — Sheila, Salma, and Ramesh among the Shishu Mandir staff who handled the transition. “They were very, very cooperative,” she said. “Once again, thank you so much.”
By June, the family had received their final court order confirming the adoption. For Bhavani, the legal milestone is only the start of what she considers the real work. “The main intention is to raise the child as our own,” she said, “and give that child good education, good values, and cultivate positive thoughts. I will take good care of the child from now on.”
Bhavani and Chandrashekar’s story is, in many ways, the adoption system working exactly as it’s designed to: no preferential treatment, no way to jump the queue, just a wait that ends when a family’s seniority number comes up and a match is right. It’s the same principle Shishu Mandir and the wider child protection network apply to every family in the queue — a strictly seniority-based, centrally tracked match, so that every waiting parent gets a fair, transparent shot at the family they’ve been hoping for.
Twenty years after they first hoped to become parents, Bhavani and Chandrashekar are raising their daughter in Ranebennur. They thank Shishu Mandir for helping them build their family, and it was a dedicated team along with their patience that helped them along the way.
