India’s Shadow Children
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 31 March 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Stephanie was brought up in France in a French family, but her birth parents are Indian – she’s an intercountry adoptee. In the 1980s and 1990s thousands of babies, like Stephanie, were adopted from India into white, western families. Now, inter-country adoption is more regulated, and there’s a recognition that this is a practice open to abuse – several countries have banned it altogether.
In France, Stephanie grew up very happily with her adoptive mum and dad. But after they both died, she began to think more about her origins. And she experienced a desire to re-connect with her motherland. In this edition of Assignment, Stephanie journeys into rural India in the state of Maharashtra with journalist, Tanya Datta. Together they attempt to find Stephanie’s birth mother. Along the way, Stephanie discovers she isn’t an ‘absolutely abandoned and destitute child’ found on the roadside as she’s been led to believe her whole life, but was born to an unmarried teenager. Nearly 40 years later, will she find that 50-something woman?
This episode of The Documentary comes to you from Assignment, investigations and journeys into the heart of global events.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.6 | Thanks for downloading the documentary from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:10.5 | I'm Tanya Data. |
| 0:12.6 | A sense of identity is something most people take for granted. |
| 0:16.8 | We know where we're from, and we know who we're related to. |
| 0:20.7 | But for thousands of people, those building blocks are trickier. |
| 0:24.7 | Since the 1970s, babies from orphanages in developing nations |
| 0:29.3 | have been removed from their countries of birth and sent abroad to be adopted. |
| 0:34.3 | I've tracked the story of one of them, Stephanie from France. |
| 0:39.2 | Here's assignment, India's Shadow Children. |
| 0:46.1 | Can you believe we're sitting here together, Steph, on a beach in Mumbai? |
| 0:52.6 | Not really, actually. |
| 0:58.5 | After my 12-hour flight, but it feels good. |
| 1:03.3 | I'm sorry for dragging you out, but look, that's the most amazing sunset. |
| 1:06.7 | It's an amazing sunset and a really amazing place. |
| 1:12.7 | I've been thinking, dreaming about coming back to India for quite some time now so I wanted to have this connection to know a bit more India, where I'm from, |
| 1:18.8 | and Mumbai is a special place for me. |
| 1:21.3 | It is. Can you say why? |
| 1:23.8 | I spent a year in an orphanage here in Mumbai, |
| 1:31.5 | and this is where I've been adopted from by my French parents. |
| 1:33.4 | And now you're back. |
| 1:38.4 | And now I'm back, and now I'm trying to reconnect with my birth story. |
... |
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