New Delhi, Oct 12 Supreme Court judge Justice J B Pardiwala on Sunday called for an annual accountability framework with clear indicators to track how well the juvenile justice system is working, saying conferences should not become yearly rituals of rediscovering familiar problems.
Delivering the closing remarks at a two-day national consultation on 10 years of the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015, Justice Pardiwala said the country's commitment to children began not in 2015, 2000 or 1986, but with the founding vision of the Constitution.
"For how many years may a gap remain a gap before it becomes an institutional failure?" he asked, cautioning that incremental improvement should not be mistaken for social transformation.
The consultation was organised by the Supreme Court's Juvenile Justice Committee with UNICEF India in the apex court auditorium.
Citing B R Ambedkar's address in the Constituent Assembly on the necessity of remedies over mere paper rights, Justice Pardiwala cautioned "against conferences becoming annual rituals of rediscovering familiar problems".
He proposed "introducing a streamlined, transparent annual accountability framework with defined indicators, measuring actual vacancies filled, standards elevated in Child Care Institutions (CCIs) and children restored to education and aftercare".
The Supreme Court judge said that the conventional administrative hierarchy must be reversed by listening to the frontline workers closest to the child-probation officers, social workers, teachers and counsellors.
He said that addressing symptoms such as removing begging children from street intersections achieves little if the child simply returns to homelessness, hunger and exploitation.
Urging institutions to test every rupee spent against whether it improves a child's life, Justice Pardiwala said the goal for the next decade should be not merely that India administered the Act better but that it became a genuinely better place in which to be a child.
Earlier, UNICEF India's Chief of Child Protection Milen Kidane said the country had established core institutional structures over the last decade, and the focus must now shift to making them transformative and responsive.
She said that under the direction of Justice B V Nagarathna, chairperson of the Juvenile Justice Committee, "stakeholders will collaborate to develop clear outlines for Juvenile Justice Boards conducting preliminary assessments in heinous offences, balancing public concern with the fundamental truth that an adolescent remains a child whose entire circumstances must be evaluated".
