1. The policy shift and the question this note raises

Over the past decade, India has witnessed a visible shift in child-care and child-protection policy towards deinstitutionalisation (Di), family strengthening (FS) and family-based alternative care (FBAC). The shift is consistent with the broad principle expressed in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and reflected in the 12th Principle of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015: children should, as far as possible, grow up in families, while institutionalisation should be a measure of last resort.

The shift deserves serious support. Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) have played an important role in bringing Di, FS & FBAC into practice through consultation, participation, networking and field-level programmes. The emphasis on family relationships recognises an important social resource that children need: enduring relationships, belonging and continuity of care.

My concern is not with the objective of reducing unnecessary institutionalisation. It is with one of the assumptions that may be entering the present policy and programme discourse: that the family was historically the principal structure responsible for the Care, Protection and Social Control (CPSC) of children; that this structure subsequently weakened or broke down; and that the appropriate corrective action is therefore to strengthen the family and return these functions to it.

That assumption requires examination. If we diagnose the historical problem incorrectly, even a well-intentioned intervention may direct resources towards the wrong unit of social organisation. Children in need of care and protection should not become subjects of another large-scale experiment based on an insufficiently examined premise.

2. The problem is real; the diagnosis may not be

There is little dispute about the seriousness of the present situation. Large numbers of children experience deprivation, violence, neglect and other forms of vulnerability. Children who come into conflict with the law may also experience punitive responses and, at times, revictimisation in the name of rehabilitation. State agencies and civil society organisations have attempted to respond through institutional care, community interventions and other forms of support, with uneven results.

The history of institutional care is particularly relevant. The State invested in residential child-care institutions and, at different stages, transferred substantial responsibility for their management to civil society organisations. Neither arrangement solved the underlying problem. Institutions have their own limitations, including the well-known risks associated with prolonged institutionalisation. Resource constraints and the low priority often accorded to child-care systems have compounded these problems.

It is therefore understandable that the institutional model is being questioned. Yet the failure of institutions does not, by itself, establish that the family is the correct replacement unit. The failure of one structure does not prove the adequacy of another.

The present policy sequence can be described broadly as three successive interventions. First, the State attempted to assume responsibility for children requiring care, protection and social control. Second, substantial responsibility was transferred to civil society while the State retained regulatory and supervisory authority. Third, there is now increasing emphasis on returning responsibility to families, supported by resources, knowledge, services and formal authority.

The third movement may be desirable in many individual cases. But its theoretical foundation deserves closer scrutiny.

3. What exactly do we mean by ‘family’?

The word ‘family’ appears to be self-explanatory, but it is not. Contemporary Indian society contains nuclear families, extended families, joint families, single-parent arrangements, childless couples, households formed through remarriage, kinship networks, and other changing forms of intimate and residential association. These formations vary across class, caste, region, community, occupation and historical period.

They also change over time. A family is not a fixed structure with a permanent set of functions. Its size, composition, authority relations, economic base, geographical location and relationship with the wider community can change substantially.

This creates an analytical problem. If the family itself is a variable social formation, on what basis can a general policy assign to ‘the family’ a stable set of functions? More importantly, which family are we referring to when we say that a function should be restored to the family?

A related problem concerns the ideal image of family. Contemporary people often associate family with affection, sacrifice, mutual obligation, protection and unconditional support. These qualities may indeed exist in many families. But an ideal image is not the same as an empirically demonstrated social function. The family as a ‘package of virtues’ is an ideal type; it should not automatically be treated as a historical fact.

This distinction matters particularly when policy is based on the proposition that families performed CPSC functions effectively in the past and can therefore be enabled to perform them again.

4. The central historical question: who performed CPSC?

The crucial question is not whether families have cared for children. Clearly, they have. The question is whether the family, understood as the biological or residential unit centred on parents and children, was historically the principal structure that created, maintained and enforced the wider conditions of care, protection and social control.

There are reasons to be cautious about assuming that it was. Human societies have used many forms of collective organisation. Kinship groups, clans, tribes, village communities, religious institutions, occupational groups and political authorities have all exercised responsibilities and powers that today may be attributed to the family or the State.

The historical record also contains family arrangements very different from the contemporary ideal of the monogamous nuclear family. The Indian epics and other traditional sources contain examples involving adoption, children born outside formal marriage, Niyoga, polygamy, polyandry and other arrangements. These examples do not by themselves prove a particular theory of social organisation, but they do caution us against projecting the contemporary family model backwards into the distant past.

The important analytical point is therefore not that one particular ancient family form was ‘correct’. It is that the social unit responsible for children may historically have been larger and more complex than the family as presently understood.

5. Three intervention models

Intervention I: The State assumes responsibility

When children are deprived of adequate care and protection, the State may assume direct responsibility. In India this produced a substantial institutional apparatus, including child-care institutions and probationary mechanisms. The legal doctrine of parens patriae provides one conceptual basis for State intervention on behalf of persons who cannot protect themselves.

Yet the State is not a family. Bureaucratic systems are designed primarily for administration, standardisation and continuity of institutional procedures. They have difficulty reproducing the dense, continuing and personalised relationships through which children experience belonging. The shortcomings of institutional care consequently became increasingly apparent.

Intervention II: Responsibility moves to civil society

The State then increasingly relied on civil society organisations to provide services and innovate in the field. This brought valuable experience, flexibility and community engagement. At the same time, the State progressively expanded registration, accountability, supervision and legal regulation. Civil society itself also had limitations and did not, as a sector, resolve the underlying problem.

The important lesson from Interventions I and II is that changing the organisational provider does not necessarily change the social structure that produces the problem.

Intervention III: Responsibility returns to the family

The current movement towards family strengthening can therefore be understood as a third intervention: responsibility for CPSC is placed, to a greater degree, with the family, while the State and civil society provide resources, knowledge, services and authority intended to enable the family to perform those functions.

There is much to welcome in reducing unnecessary State and institutional intrusion into family life. But the argument becomes problematic if it rests on the proposition that the family historically possessed, by itself, the authority and resources required to perform these functions.

6. Structural functionalism: a useful question, but not a complete answer

A temporary use of structural functionalism helps clarify the problem. Functions require structures capable of performing them. As societies become more differentiated, functions may become distributed among increasingly specialised structures. Modernisation can therefore involve both structural differentiation and functional specialisation.

The family has also changed. It has become smaller in many contexts, and its members may be geographically dispersed through migration, employment, displacement, disaster or conflict. Families may voluntarily reduce their size, but they may also be fragmented by forces beyond their control.

The question then becomes: how reasonable is it to expect a structurally smaller and geographically dispersed family to perform functions that may once have depended upon larger and more territorially compact social arrangements?

Structural functionalism alone cannot answer that question. It does, however, expose a potential mismatch between the structure to which a function is assigned and the actual capacity of that structure to perform it.

7. A historical-materialist hypothesis

A second analytical lens is historical materialism: the proposition that control over the means of production and the distribution of material resources influence social organisation, authority and values. I do not claim this as a complete explanation of Indian social history. I use it here as a hypothesis that may help us ask a different question.

If a social group historically possessed control over land or other sustained resources, that control could provide more than economic security. It could support authority, collective organisation, obligation, conformity and the capacity to mobilise members. In such a system, care and protection may not have depended on the individual family possessing sufficient resources on its own.

This possibility becomes important when considering the Indian institution referred to in this note as the Kul. (कुळ).

8. The Kul hypothesis

The argument advanced here is that the Kul was a social formation larger than the family and that, in relevant historical contexts, it possessed both collective authority and control over material resources. Its members were connected not merely by biological descent but through a wider structure of obligation, authority and collective identity.

The precise historical meaning of Kul varied across regions and periods, and the concept should not be mechanically equated with ‘clan’ or ‘family’. The proposition here is narrower: some social functions that are now attributed to the family may historically have been performed by a wider collective structure.

The distinction is important. A family may contain parents and children; a larger collective can organise the conduct of many families and individuals. If that collective controls resources, exercises authority and maintains a system of mutual obligations, it may possess capacities that an individual household does not.

The historical and pre-historical examples invoked in this note are intended to raise this possibility, not to claim that all Indian communities followed one identical Kul system. The proposition offered here should be empirically tested and where empirical research is not possible it should be critically examined by the scholars of History before it can be treated as established fact.

9. Land, authority and the transformation of the Kul

The relationship between social organisation and control over land provides the next part of the argument. In the historical transformations associated with Mughal and British rule, systems of land tenure and revenue administration were altered and superimposed upon existing social arrangements. Later colonial and post-colonial reforms further transformed relationships between land, tenancy, authority and community.

The present note’s hypothesis is that these changes affected not merely who owned or cultivated land but also the social institutions whose authority had been connected with control over resources. When control over resources changes hands or is fragmented, the social obligations and collective mechanisms associated with that control may also weaken.

Post-Independence land reforms and the conversion of tenants into owners (The 1st April 1957 Tenancy Act or Kul Kayada) represented important movements towards equality and redistribution. But a policy directed at land rights does not necessarily recreate the social institutions that formerly organised collective responsibility. If a wider collective institution had once coordinated care, protection and social control, removing or transforming its resource base could leave a functional gap.

This is the point at which the historical argument connects with the contemporary child-protection problem.

10. Why money alone may not strengthen the family sufficiently

Family-strengthening programmes often provide forms of material assistance: cash support, food assistance, sponsorship, livelihood support and access to services. These measures may be essential and may prevent separation in individual cases. But material assistance should not be confused with restoration of an entire social structure.

If the historical capacity to perform CPSC depended not simply on money but on collective authority, coordination, geographical proximity, shared norms and the ability to mobilise a large number of people, then adding money to an individual household will not necessarily recreate that capacity.

This distinction is central. The missing element may not be a resource deficit inside the family. It may be the disappearance or fragmentation of the larger social structure within which families once operated.

The family may therefore be an important unit of intervention without necessarily being the complete unit of analysis.

11. The problem of geographical dispersion

There is another practical dimension. Traditional collective structures, where they existed, were often geographically compact. The people who knew a child, exercised authority over the family and could respond to a crisis lived within a relatively accessible social space.

Modern migration, urbanisation, displacement, employment patterns and family fragmentation have altered that geography. Kin may exist in large numbers but may be scattered across towns, cities or states. A policy may identify relatives and still be unable to mobilise them as a functioning collective.

This helps explain why programmes that attempt to mobilise kinship resources can encounter an obstacle that cash assistance cannot remove: physical dispersal.

12. What this means for Di, FS and FBAC

None of the above arguments implies that children should be institutionalised unnecessarily or that families should be excluded from child-protection responses. Family relationships can and do provide care and protection in many circumstances. The caution is that such willingness and capacity cannot be presumed merely from the existence of a family relationship.

The same caution applies, even more strongly, to kinship. A relative may be willing to care for a child; another may not. A relative may be emotionally attached to the child; another may have no such attachment. A relative may have the material capacity to help; another may be struggling to survive. Kinship therefore cannot be treated as a dependable institutional resource simply because a biological or social relationship exists.

More importantly, kinship is not equivalent to the Kul. A number of relatives, however well intentioned, do not automatically constitute a collective authority. They may provide care. Some may provide protection. But where is the mechanism of social control?

Who has the legitimate authority to say that the child’s protection is a collective responsibility? Who can require members to act when one member fails? Who can coordinate the contribution of several households? Who can intervene when an adult’s conduct harms the child? Who can enforce an obligation when individual family interests conflict with the child’s interests? Who can maintain that obligation over time?

These are not merely questions of affection or financial capacity. They are questions of institutional authority, collective organisation, coordination, conformity and legitimate social control. Kinship may create relationships; it does not, by itself, create the institutional machinery through which CPSC can be collectively performed.

This distinction is central to the argument of this note. The Kul, as hypothesised here, was not simply an enlarged family or a collection of relatives. Its significance lay in its capacity to hold a larger collective together, exercise authority, coordinate members, harness their loyalties and conformity, and organise the performance of CPSC collectively. Its material base and its geographical compactness were important parts of that capacity.

Consequently, the disappearance or fragmentation of the Kul cannot be repaired merely by identifying surviving relatives, providing resources to families, or attempting to assemble kin around a child. Even physical proximity would not, by itself, recreate the institutional structure that has disappeared.

Family strengthening may therefore be an important component of a child-protection response, but it should not be confused with reconstruction of the social structure that historically enabled CPSC. If the Kul hypothesis has validity, the present problem is not simply that families have become weak. It is that the larger structure within which families were embedded and through which collective CPSC was organised has been fragmented or destroyed.

13. A revised way of posing the policy question

The central question should therefore not be: ‘How do we return CPSC to the family?’

Nor should it be: ‘How do we mobilise kinship around the child?’ That formulation still assumes that kinship carries an inherent willingness and capacity to undertake CPSC.

The more fundamental question is: ‘What social structure possesses, or can legitimately be given, the capacity to provide sustained Care, Protection and Social Control for the child—and what has to be created, rebuilt or strengthened to make that possible?’

This question deliberately separates relationship from institutional capacity. A family relationship may provide care. A kinship relationship may sometimes provide care or protection. Neither, by itself, establishes the collective authority and mechanisms required for social control.

If the Kul system once supplied that collective capacity, its disappearance presents a problem that cannot be solved simply by transferring resources to individual families. The policy task may therefore be more difficult than family strengthening in its present formulation. It may require us first to understand what institutional functions have disappeared, which of them can realistically be reconstructed, and which must be provided through new social arrangements.

14. Conclusion: do not search in the wrong place

The present movement towards deinstitutionalisation and family-based alternative care is an important corrective to the excessive reliance on residential institutions. It deserves careful development rather than rejection. But precisely because it concerns the lives of large numbers of children, its assumptions must be examined with equal seriousness.

The principal caution of this note is that the contemporary family should not automatically be treated as the historical unit that once performed all functions of Care, Protection and Social Control. Nor should kinship be treated as a substitute for that lost capacity. Family and kinship relationships may be important components of care, but Social Control requires a collective structure possessing legitimate authority, coordination and mechanisms for securing conformity to shared obligations.

The Kul hypothesis offered here is an attempt to identify such a historical collective structure. It is not presented as a final historical verdict. It is a proposition requiring further historical and empirical investigation. Its value lies partly in changing the question we ask: not how to make the present family perform functions it may never have performed alone, but what happened to the wider structure that once made collective CPSC possible.

If the breakdown of CPSC is partly a consequence of the fragmentation of a larger social structure, then putting money, services or relatives around individual families may be necessary in particular cases but insufficient as a general solution. We may need to understand what collective capacity has disappeared and whether any credible institutional form can replace it.

A feasible solution to the present crisis may not yet be fully visible. But that is precisely why analytical caution is necessary. Before we invest heavily in a new model, we should be certain that we are not searching for the answer in the wrong place or not barking up the wrong tree.

This note is not an attempt to imply that there was a Golden Age in the past and the Indian society functioned in an ideal way. It is far from an appeal to bring back the past historical or prehistorical institutions and practices to solve present day’s problems.