Juvenile criminals to get a better deal

One of the highlights of the new rules would be abolition of life imprisonment for children, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jan 16, 2007, 21:20:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Very soon, children on streets or abandoned or those in conflict with law can dream of a better life as rules for their adopted are being eased.

Life imprisonment for children will be history in India as maximum retention of three years in juvenile homes has been prescribed in the new rules to be notified by the Ministry of Women and Child Development shortly.

The rules that will make the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) Amendment Act, 2006 effective would be notified by end of January. The amendments were notified on August 23, 2006, by the government.

According to the WCD ministry officials, the new rules have been formulated by the Law ministry and are at the final stages of the approval. "We expect the amendments to come into force by end of this month," a ministry official said.

Once that happens, all children below 18 years would be available for adoption. The present guidelines impose restrictions on adoptions based on the religion and age of the person adopting the child.

"A Hindu kid cannot be adopted by a Muslim family and vice-versa. This is because there is no clarity in the present Act on the issue of who can adopt whom," said a senior executive of an international NGO.

The new section 41 in the Act implies that state government will recognise one or more institutions or voluntary organisations in each district as specialised adoption agencies for all children.

But adoption will take place only when after the child has been cleared for adoption by a child welfare committee, the rules say. But when actual adoption process would start the rules of Child Adoption Agency will apply, an official said. However, children would be allowed to given for adoption to a person irrespective of marital status, to parents irrespective of number of children they have or childless couples.

The rules also make life easier for children in conflict with law. Life imprisonment of who were children at the time of committing the crime has been prohibited. They could be kept in juvenile homes for three years. After that, they would have to be either restored back to parents or made available for adoption.

Once the amendments come into force, state governments will have to constitute district level juvenile justice boards and child welfare committees.

The new rule also makes registration of all voluntary agencies dealing with children mandatory. Even the police will have to set up child protection units at district and the state level and special officers will have to be appointed to investigate the cases
involving juveniles.

For media, violating the act would become costlier. As against the earlier provision of Rs 1,000 as fine, the amount would increase to Rs 25,000. The amendment also prohibits disclosure of name, address, school or any other particulars calculated to lead to the identification of the juvenile.

Publication of the picture of the child needing care and protection under the juvenile act is also not allowed.

Email Chetan Chauhan: chetan @hindustantimes.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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