The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 was formulated a decade ago to ensure a caring approach to children in conflict with the law. It was meant to be distinct from laws for adults in being child-friendly. Ten years after the law was formulated, there appears to be a large gap between legislative intent and its execution. This is the message of the study produced by the India Justice Report called the “Juvenile Justice and Children in Conflict with the Law: A Study of Capacity at the Frontlines”. It shows that the system is data-opaque: 250 right to information applications were needed for the study to gather data from all over India. But the information received was not complete. Since there is no central repository of juvenile justice cases, the need for data transparency is paramount. On top of that, there were over 50,000 children awaiting justice at the end of October, 2023. This goes directly against the principal purpose of the Act to ensure that children’s cases are quickly disposed of so that their sense of dignity is not hurt and they are not left helplessly in the system. Yet the children are left like adult under-trial prisoners, suggesting that the attitude behind the neglect is no different.
It is not enough to say that the system is struggling. Any system is run by human beings and if it is failing the children, it must be laid at the door of the officials behind it. Otherwise it is not possible to explain why 111 out of 470 Juvenile Justice Boards do not have the full complement of a principal magistrate and two social workers, why certain states have no ‘places of safety’ for older teenagers, why 30% of 437 Boards have no legal services clinic, why almost 80% of child care institutions have no medical staff or why only 810 mandatory inspections of CCIs by the Boards were conducted instead of 1,992. And these findings are from incomplete data as the India Justice Report did not get responses from all states. The report is most disheartening as it shows that the Indian tendency to be uncaring of children’s rights and sensitivities has spilled over to the legal arena. State governments and those tasked with running the juvenile justice system are all equally responsible for this failure.