Dilution of India’s juvenile system: Dangerous signals

The Private Member’s Bill introduced in the Parliament in December 2025 seeking to further reduce the age of children accused of heinous offences (with punishment more than 7 years) from 16 years to 14 years to be treated as adults, is premised on a widely held but deeply flawed assumption, that crimes by children are rising alarmingly and that the juvenile justice system is overly lenient. The available facts, legal history, and constitutional reasoning decisively rebut this assumption.

As against the common belief that juvenile crimes are attaining alarming proportions in the country, the latest figures from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) present a very different picture. There is only a marginal increase from 31,170 cases in 2021 to 31,365 cases in 2023, with crimes committed by children constituting less than 0.1 per cent of the total crimes committed in the country, while children constitute nearly 40 per cent of India’s population. This situation was no different when the Juvenile Justice Act was amended in 2015.

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The number of children involved in heinous crimes has consistently remained a very small fraction of total juvenile cases, a problem that can easily be addressed by the country’s existing governance and criminal justice apparatus.

More striking is the comparative analysis of ‘crimes by children’ versus ‘crimes against children’. Against 31,365 crimes committed by children in 2023, children became victims in 177,335 crimes, including 66,232 sexual offences under the POCSO Act. These numbers increase every year, confirming the disturbing findings of the Government and ‘Prayas’-led National Study on Child Abuse, which showed that every second child among 18,000 respondents suffered mild to severe sexual abuse.

The crisis facing children in India is not one of juvenile criminality, but of systemic failure to protect children from violence, abuse, and exploitation.

Yet, public discourse continues to be driven by outrage rather than evidence. This was evident after the Nirbhaya case in 2012, when one of the accused, a 17-year-old boy, was mistakenly portrayed as the most brutal, triggering an uninformed demand to reduce the age of juvenility. That demand led to marathon arguments before the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India in the landmark cases of Salil Bali vs union of India (2013) and Subramanium Swamy vs Raju through Member Juvenile Justice Board (2014). Successive benches led by Chief Justices Altmash Kabir and P. Sathasivam emphatically rejected any reduction in age.

Fortuitously, the Ministry of Women and Child Development supported this position, and Prayas, as a children’s rights organisation, intervened to assist the Court. The Court was taken through the evolution of the juvenile justice system in India and the universally accepted principle of differential treatment for children below 18 years. The same position was endorsed by the Post-Nirbhaya Justice Verma Committee and the Parliamentary Standing Committee, both of which recognised that children are not adults in the eyes of the law.

Children cannot vote, drive, marry, own property independently, or vindicate their Fundamental Rights through writ petitions. Children in Conflict with Law (CCL), Children in Need of Care and Protection (CNCP), and Child Victims of Crime (CVC) are legally incapacitated. They must be represented by guardians or support persons. Transferring such children into India’s criminal justice system results in grave injustice, as they are doubly deprived of their ability to defend themselves, both within the juvenile justice system and within the criminal justice system.

It is precisely for these reasons that the Juvenile Justice Act operates on principles fundamentally different from criminal law. Unlike the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, and Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, the JJ Act does not contemplate investigation, trial, prosecution, defence, or conviction. It provides only for inquiries and dispositional orders. The Investigating Officer collects information regarding the circumstances of apprehension (not arrest) and the child’s antecedents and submits a Social Background Report to the Juvenile Justice Board. Along with Social Investigation Reports prepared by case workers, these form the sole basis for decision-making.

There is no open court presentation of evidence, no charge sheet, no framing of charges, and no adversarial argument. The child has no real opportunity to defend or vindicate himself, as was the situation in respect of the juvenile in the Nirbhaya case, making the application of adult criminal processes not only inappropriate but fundamentally unjust.

Routine NCRB analyses further show that the vast majority of children apprehended are from extremely poor backgrounds, often homeless, without family support, and minimally educated or school drop-outs. In reality, a large proportion of children categorised as Children in Conflict with Law (CCL) are also Children in Need of Care and Protection (CNCP), much like the child allegedly involved in the Nirbhaya case. The tragedy is compounded by the utter non-implementation of child protection laws. In 2023, only 397 cases of human trafficking and 1,390 cases of child labour were registered nationwide, despite millions of children being trafficked and forced into labour.

The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, is not merely a law for delinquent children; it is the basic protective framework for all children. The vast majority of children dealt with under this law have nothing to do with crime. With growing pressure to dilute its reformative ethos, the critical distinction between the juvenile justice system and the criminal justice system is being steadily eroded.

In this context, any demand to further reduce the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 14 years is not just misguided, it is a direct assault on constitutional principles, established jurisprudence, and empirical evidence. At best, such a demand is outrageous.

(The author is ex. DGP and Founder of Prayas JAS Society. The views expressed by the author are personal)