50,000 kids still await justice as juvenile boards battle 55% case backlog: Report

A new India Justice Report (IJR) has cast an unflinching light on India’s juvenile justice system, revealing a landscape where more than 50,000 children in conflict with the law remain trapped in a slow, burdened, and uneven machinery.

Despite a decade since the Juvenile Justice Act came into force, the study warns that the system’s foundations remain riddled with gaps — from missing judges and poorly inspected homes to fractured data systems and deep state-level disparities.

Titled Juvenile Justice and Children in Conflict with the Law: A Study of Capacity at the Frontlines, the report paints a sobering picture: as of 31 October 2023, 55 per cent of 100,904 cases before Juvenile Justice Boards (JJBs) remained pending, with pendency soaring as high as 83 per cent in Odisha and dipping to 35 per cent in Karnataka. Even though 92 per cent of India’s districts have constituted JJBs, one in every four boards is functioning without a full bench, and on average, each board is weighed down by a backlog of 154 cases.

These findings unfold against the backdrop of 40,036 juveniles apprehended in 2023, most of them between 16 and 18 years old — a reminder of the vast human stakes entangled in the delays.

The report reveals that 30 per cent of JJBs lack a legal services clinic, leaving countless children without essential legal support. Fourteen states and Jammu & Kashmir still have no ‘places of safety’, facilities meant to house children above 18 who require protection. Oversight mechanisms are faltering as well: in 166 Child Care Institutions across several states, only 810 of the required 1,992 inspections were conducted. And in 292 districts surveyed, there are just 40 homes exclusively for girls, a stark indicator of systemic neglect.

Perhaps most troubling is the near-absence of cohesive, accessible national-level data on juvenile justice. Without an equivalent of the National Judicial Data Grid for JJBs, the IJR team had to file more than 250 RTIs to piece together information. Of the 500 responses received, only 36% yielded usable data, while many were rejected, ignored, or passed from one office to another — a reflection of the system’s fractured transparency.

Calling the findings a “warning sign”, Maja Daruwala, chief editor of the India Justice Report, said the system’s ability to protect children depends on a steady flow of reliable information. Yet the struggle to obtain even basic data showed that authorised oversight bodies “neither receive it routinely nor insist on it. Scattered and irregular data makes supervision episodic and accountability hollow.”

The report lays bare not just numbers, but a profound truth: that India’s youngest and most vulnerable depend on a system that is urgently in need of repair, reinvigoration, and renewed moral clarity.

With PTI inputs