A comprehensive India Justice Report released on Thursday has exposed a staggering crisis in the country’s juvenile justice framework, with more than 50,000 children in conflict with the law trapped in indefinite legal delays as 55 per cent of over 100,000 cases remain unresolved across 362 Juvenile Justice Boards, ten years after the landmark Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2015 came into effect.

The study, titled Juvenile Justice and Children in Conflict with the Law: A Study of Capacity at the Frontlines, documents systemic collapse marked by chronic vacancies in judicial and social worker posts, non-functional oversight mechanisms, severely under-equipped child care institutions, and stark regional disparities that range from an alarming 83 per cent pendency in Odisha to a comparatively lower 35 per cent in Karnataka.

Despite 92 per cent of India’s 765 districts having constituted JJBs, one in every four boards continues to operate without a complete bench of principal magistrate and two social workers, resulting in an average caseload of 154 pending matters per board and prolonged detention or uncertainty for thousands of adolescents, most of whom are aged 16–18 and were apprehended in 40,036 cases registered in 2023 alone under IPC and special laws.

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Critical support infrastructure remains absent or inadequate: 30 per cent of JJBs lack attached legal services clinics, 14 states including Jammu & Kashmir have no designated places of safety for children who cross the age of 18 during trial, and mandated inspections of child care institutions are routinely skipped, with only 810 of 1,992 required inspections conducted across 166 homes in select states, while just 40 exclusive homes exist for girls nationwide.

The report’s most disturbing revelation is the complete absence of transparent national-level data, forcing researchers to file over 250 RTI applications; of the responses received from 28 states and two Union Territories, 11 per cent were outright rejected, 24 per cent went unanswered, and 29 per cent were merely transferred, leaving only 36 per cent of replies usable and confirming that the juvenile justice system operates in an accountability vacuum with no equivalent of the National Judicial Data Grid for real-time monitoring.

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