New rules soft on juvenile offenders

According to the new Juvenile Justice rules, children in conflict with the law will now be let off with community service, which they can perform while living with their parents or guardians, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Nov 17, 2007, 02:01:33 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Children in conflict with the law will now be let off with community service, which they can perform while living with their parents or guardians, according to the new Juvenile Justice rules notified on Friday.

The rules allow Juvenile Justice Boards to order children involved in crimes with punishments of less than seven years to perform community service, including cleaning parks, serving the elderly in nursing homes, helping the local police, hospital or fire department and serving disabled children.

The police will not be allowed to arrest these children and can only record information. Soon after the apprehension of a child (defined as someone below 18 years of age), he or she has to be handed over to the special Juvenile Police Unit, which is then required to ensure the juvenile appears before a Juvenile Justice Board within 24 hours. Under the rules, policemen in uniform cannot apprehend such children.

The amended Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000 also says primary responsibility of the child lies with the biological or foster parents, who have to ensure the child performs the required community service. The boards will allow foster care with an individual or voluntary organization on a bond before they are adopted.

“The concept is similar to that in Western countries where the child can live with the family but with certain restrictions,” said an official with the Ministry of Women and Child Development.

To check the rising number of street children involved in crime, the rules provides for repatriation and restoration to families, unless it is not in the interest of the child. Also, the past record of the child will have to be scrapped by the board, to be constituted in each district.

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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