Fifty Thousand Children, One Fragile System: What The New India Justice Report Tells Us About Juvenile Justice

Ten years after Parliament rewrote the law for children in conflict with the law, the institutions tasked with delivering that promise look worryingly similar to the ones the law was meant to replace. At the launch of the India Justice Report's new study on juvenile justice, the conversation in the room kept circling back to the same disquieting theme: an Act built on rehabilitation, and a system that continues to default to the instincts of the criminal courts. The numbers tell one story, but the everyday practices narrated by judges, lawyers, probation officers and social workers tell another, and together, they reveal how structural neglect has hollowed out the constitutional vision of child rights.

The newly launched report on “Juvenile Justice and Children in Conflict with the Law: A Study of Capacity at the Frontlines” by the India Justice Report maps this contradiction with uncomfortable clarity. Ten years after the 2015 Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act came into force, more than half of all cases before Juvenile Justice Boards remain pending. Out of 1,00,904 cases, 55% are yet to be disposed of, with over 50,000 children caught in this backlog. The pendency stretches from 83% in Odisha to 35% in Karnataka.

These are not just stray numbers; rather, they tell a story of a system that is under-staffed by design, over-reliant on carceral responses, and structurally indifferent to the idea of rehabilitation that sits at the heart of the JJ Act.

Capacity Gaps Or A Quiet Policy Choice?

The report's headline findings are now familiar: 92 % of India's 765 districts have JJBs, but one in four boards is not fully constituted; 24 % operate without the full bench required by law. Nearly 30 % of boards do not have an attached legal services clinic, despite the fact that every child before a JJB is, by definition, entitled to free legal aid.

From the dais, this was often described in the vocabulary of “capacity” and “frontline deficits”. But once you sit with the numbers, the gaps start to look less like logistical slippages and more like a quiet policy choice. When a law builds an interdisciplinary body that brings together a principal magistrate and two social workers, and a quarter of those bodies are allowed to run without full strength for years, the problem is not just one of vacancy but also of priority.

The report also shows that JJBs have disposed of less than half the cases filed before them and that each board, on average, is carrying a caseload of 154 pending cases annually. In some states, the response to rising pendency has been to hurriedly constitute additional boards. Yet, as one panellist pointed out, you can multiply institutions and still not change outcomes if the everyday practices inside those boards remain tethered to the criminal justice system rather than to child rights.

Petty Offences, Adult Carceral Logic

The disconnect between law on paper and law in practice comes through sharply in how the system treats petty offences. Under the JJ Act, these are supposed to be dealt with swiftly, with a clear statutory ceiling on how long inquiries can run. In Delhi, a writ petition revealed more than 200 petty-offence cases where children had been entangled in proceedings for over six months, sometimes for well over a year. The Delhi High Court ultimately ordered that all petty-offence cases pending for over a year be terminated, recognising that the mere fact of being kept in the system, hearing after adjourned hearing, is itself a form of harm. Yet, as the IJR team and panellists underlined, similar patterns continue elsewhere, and FIRs continue to be routinely registered for petty acts that should never reach the threshold of formal prosecution. Children are produced before magistrates or sent to the nearest district jail because transporting them to a distant JJB is often seen as an avoidable administrative burden.

When board members raise concerns about the long-term impact of this approach on a child's life chances, those inputs often do not make it into the final orders. Social-worker members, who were meant to bring in perspectives from psychology, social work, and community rehabilitation, are treated as secondary to the magistrate. Many boards in practice function with only advocates on the panel, collapsing an interdisciplinary vision into a narrow, legalistic one.

Behind these choices sits an overstretched and under-supported workforce. In some districts, there are three legal-cum-probation officers covering eleven districts, with each officer carrying hundreds of cases at a time. Probation-cum-legal officers end up juggling home visits, counselling, documentation and court work, often with little safety, almost no support staff, and no meaningful say in how their work is structured.

Two Systems On Paper, One System On The Ground

On paper, the JJ Act creates a wall between the juvenile and adult criminal systems, with a different law on bail, different procedures, and a rehabilitative philosophy directly traceable to the Constitution and to India's obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, but in reality, that wall is porous.

Recent Supreme Court interventions have tried to reinforce these distinctions. In one line of cases, including Juvenile in Conflict with Law v. State of Rajasthan, the Court has criticised lower courts for denying bail to children without applying the specific test under section 12(1) of the JJ Act, which presumes release unless there is a concrete risk of harm or justice being defeated. In another decision, Justices Abhay Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan acquitted a woman 23 years after a murder case when it emerged she had been a juvenile at the time of the offence, which further underscores how catastrophic it is when the system fails to apply the juvenile framework at the right time.

Justice Madan B. Lokur's keynote address at the report launch kept returning to this basic point: if the law insists that children in conflict with the law are to be treated differently, institutions cannot keep defaulting to the culture, timelines and instincts of the adult criminal courts. Multiplying diversion, community service, and non-institutional care is not a progressive add-on, but what compliance with the JJ Act must look like.

Yet the infrastructure that should make this possible remains underdeveloped. Mission Vatsalya is the central scheme tasked with financing the child-protection architecture, which provides funds for Child Care Institutions and after-care services, and explicitly positions itself as the vehicle for implementing the JJ Act. But as the report notes, in 166 homes across 14 states and one Union Territory, only 810 of the 1,992 mandated inspections were actually carried out. Across 292 districts, there are just 40 homes exclusively for girls. The result is thus a cruel paradox, where a child may be diverted away from adult jail into an observation home or “place of safety”, only to find barbed wires, overcrowding, no schooling worth the name, and a complete absence of meaningful reintegration planning.

The Numbers We Talk About, And The Numbers We Ignore

The conversation around juvenile justice in India rarely unfolds in a vacuum. It sits alongside panics about juvenile crime, often fuelled by media reporting on a handful of serious cases. The IJR report lands in the same month as the latest NCRB figures on crimes against children: 1,77,335 such cases were recorded in 2023, a near ten-fold increase since 2005, with kidnapping and sexual offences under POCSO together accounting for more than 80 % of these crimes.

What the juvenile justice data quietly does is force us to hold two truths together. First, that children are overwhelmingly victims in the system, not offenders. Second, that even for the smaller subset of children alleged to have offended, the state's response is structurally unable to deliver on its own promise of care and rehabilitation.

As one speaker put it, there is a certain ease with which we have accepted that delays are inevitable, that vacancies will remain, that social workers will be brought in without training, and that legal aid lawyers will appear in name but not in function. The framing of capacity can sometimes domesticate these choices, turning what are essentially questions of political will and rights into questions of management.

From Infrastructure To Accountability

Justice Lokur was blunt about where responsibility lies. Every authority in the JJ chain, including the police, the JJB, the Child Welfare Committee, and the District Child Protection Unit, functions through its own chain of command, with very little consequence built into the system for non-compliance or delay. Social audits are rarely institutionalised, and independent evaluations are commissioned and quietly forgotten.

Two concrete pathways emerged from the discussion. The first is data: without a central, public-facing data grid for JJBs, something on the lines of the National Judicial Data Grid, civil society, researchers and even judges are largely dependent on RTIs and piecemeal responses to understand how the system is actually performing. The IJR study itself had to piece together its dataset through hundreds of RTI applications, some of which were rejected outright or returned incomplete.

The second is accountability that travels upstream. Filling vacancies and building more homes will not be enough if there is no clear assignment of responsibility about who answers when a child is kept in an adult jail contrary to law; when age is deliberately mis-recorded; when a child is not produced before a board within 24 hours; when an observatory replicates the architecture of a prison.

Underlying all this is a dilemma that several judicial officers face– is it better to dispose of cases quickly so that children are not stuck in a punitive environment, or to keep matters pending in the hope that some rehabilitative work can be done while they remain in the system? That such a trade-off exists at all is less a reflection of individual judges and more a verdict on the architecture we have built around them.

If the JJ Act is to be more than a benevolent preamble, the questions thrown up by the India Justice Report cannot remain in conference halls and panel discussions. They must find their way into budget speeches, training curricula, inspection checklists and day-to-day courtroom practice. Children do not experience capacity gaps; rather, they experience delayed hearings, indifferent lawyers, barred windows and files that never move. A decade after the law promised otherwise, that should unsettle us far more than it currently does.

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