Reforming Juvenile Justice in India: Balancing Child Rights, Accountability, and Rehabilitation
Raghvendra Kumar ChaudharyOct 18, 202610.5281/zenodo.23456778pp. 634–64916 pages
The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 allows a child aged sixteen or seventeen who is alleged to have committed a heinous offence to be tried as an adult after a "preliminary assessment" by the Juvenile Justice Board. This paper argues that the transfer mechanism is less a principled answer to serious adolescent offending than a legislative compromise whose costs fall on the procedural guarantees the Act otherwise extends to children. It reads section 15 against the Supreme Court's decisions in Shilpa Mittal and Barun Chandra Thakur, the age-determination case law, and the developmental research on adolescent culpability, and it engages the retributive and victim-centred case for transfer on its own terms. Accountability and rehabilitation, the paper contends, are not two poles to be traded off at a single age threshold. Both depend on institutional capacity that the system has never been resourced to supply: functioning Boards, trained probation staff, individual care plans that are actually followed, and aftercare that reaches young people beyond eighteen. Reform should narrow and proceduralise transfer, introduce statutory diversion, decouple offence classification from the general penal code, and treat implementation failure as a rights violation rather than an administrative shortfall.