Justice Pardiwala seeks annual audit of juvenile justice system

Justice J B Pardiwala called for an annual accountability framework to assess India's juvenile justice system. He said measurable outcomes and frontline feedback are vital if the law is to improve children's lives.Image used for representational purposes onlyNewdelhi,Oct 12, 2026 19:28 ISTSupreme 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. He said conferences should not become annual exercises in revisiting the same issues, and stressed that incremental improvement should not be mistaken for social transformation.Speaking at the close of a two-day national consultation on 10 years of the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015, Justice Pardiwala said India’s commitment to children did not begin in 2015, 2000 or 1986, but with the founding vision of the Constitution. The consultation was organised by the Supreme Court’s Juvenile Justice Committee with UNICEF India in the apex court auditorium.Justice Pardiwala asked, "For how many years may a gap remain a gap before it becomes an institutional failure?" Referring to B R Ambedkar’s address in the Constituent Assembly on the need for remedies rather than only paper rights, he 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". He also said the conventional administrative hierarchy must be reversed by listening to frontline workers closest to the child, including probation officers, social workers, teachers and counsellors. He said addressing symptoms, such as removing begging children from street intersections, achieves little if the child 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 set up core institutional structures over the past 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". Overall, the consultation focused on improving accountability, strengthening institutions and ensuring that the juvenile justice system brings meaningful change to children’s lives. - Ends