The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Human Resource Development cited Supreme Court judgments, international conventions, and the experience of countries which have experimented with transferring juvenile cases to adult courts in making this recommendation.

The Committee took a serious view of the Woman and Child Development Ministry ignoring observations and judgements of the apex court.

In 2013, the court had observed that there may be child offenders who cannot be “re-integrated into mainstream society, but such examples are not of such proportions as to warrant any change in thinking’’, and it is better to try and mainstream them rather than allow them to develop into hardened criminals.

The UNICEF is also on record describing the proposed amendment as a “real step back’’ as worldwide evidence shows that the process of transfer of judicial cases to adult courts has not resulted in reduction of crime or recidivism.

Given the opposition to this provision of the Bill, the committee invited some leading child rights groups and found that many observations and suggestions made by these stakeholders had not been factored into the draft legislation.

The committee found merit in their scepticism about the NCRB basing its data on the number juveniles named in FIRs and not on the number of children found guilty. “The objective analysis of the data of the NCRB placed before the Committee makes it abundantly clear that the percentage of juvenile crimes in India – 1.2 per cent of the total child population – is quite low.’’

Source: TH