Juvenile Justice Act 2015: Board and Committee (Unit IX)

Section 2(12) defines a child as a person who has not completed eighteen years of age, a single threshold that applies regardless of offence. What changes with the offence is not who counts as a child but which procedure applies.

The Act sorts offences into three tiers by the punishment prescribed elsewhere in law: a petty offence carries up to three years, a serious offence carries more than three but not more than seven years, and a heinous offence carries a minimum of seven years or more.

For petty and serious offences, whatever the child's age, the Board's own inquiry and disposition is final, ending at most in a stay of up to three years in a special home.

The feature that most distinguishes the 2015 Act from the 2000 Act it replaced is the route for a heinous offence allegation against a child of sixteen to eighteen years: the Board completes a preliminary assessment, and if it finds the child should be tried as an adult, the case moves to a Children's Court. Even then, Section 21 bars a death sentence or an irreducible life sentence for any child in conflict with law.

For the large majority of cases, Section 18(1) gives the Board a graded menu of dispositions: discharge after advice or admonition, group counselling, community service, a fine on the parent or guardian, probation with supervision, or, only where nothing else is adequate, a special home for a period that never exceeds three years and never runs past the child's eighteenth birthday. Memorise this graded structure as the ordinary outcome, with the adult-trial route as the narrow exception.

Section 4 requires every district to have one or more Juvenile Justice Boards. Each Board is a bench of three: a Metropolitan Magistrate or a Judicial Magistrate of the First Class, other than the Chief Metropolitan or Chief Judicial Magistrate, with at least three years of experience, sitting as Principal Magistrate, plus two social worker members, at least one of whom must be a woman. At least one member overall must have specific training in child psychology, child welfare, education or a related field.

The Board has exclusive jurisdiction over any child alleged to be in conflict with law, which excludes an ordinary criminal court from trying such a child directly. A quorum of two members, including the Principal Magistrate, is needed, and a decision requires at least two members to concur. The Board also has an administrative role: it is consulted on conditions in observation homes and special homes and monitors children placed in aftercare.

A Special Juvenile Police Unit or Child Welfare Police Officer must produce an apprehended child before the Board, ordinarily within twenty-four hours, rather than an ordinary lock-up or magistrate's court. Bail is the default position: a child is released on bail with or without surety unless the Board records specific reasons, such as a likelihood of moral, physical or psychological danger, to justify detention in an observation home instead.

When a child of sixteen to eighteen years is alleged to have committed a heinous offence, Section 15 requires the Board to complete a preliminary assessment examining the child's mental and physical capacity to commit the offence, the child's ability to understand the consequences, and the circumstances in which the offence is alleged to have occurred.

The Board is deciding a jurisdictional question at this stage, not guilt: whether the case stays with the Board or moves to a Children's Court.

The Act directs the Board to take the assistance of experienced psychologists or psycho-social workers while forming this opinion, and Section 14 sets an outer time limit of three months from the child's first production, extendable by fifteen days for recorded reasons.

The provision has been challenged on due-process grounds since 2015, and courts examining it have so far upheld its validity while stressing that the assessment must be a genuine, expert-assisted evaluation rather than a formality. For NET purposes, remember that this route applies only to the sixteen-to-eighteen, heinous-offence combination, never to a younger child or a lesser offence.

Section 27 requires the State Government to constitute one or more Child Welfare Committees for every district. Each Committee has a Chairperson and four other members, at least one a woman and another an expert on children's matters, holding office for three years. Unlike the Board, no member is required to be a judicial officer, though the Committee exercises the powers of a Judicial Magistrate of the First Class for the purposes the Act assigns it.

The Committee has final authority over a child in need of care and protection, a category under Section 2(14) covering a child without a home or guardian, a child who is a victim of abuse or trafficking, or a child whose guardian is unfit or unwilling to provide care.

A child comes before the Committee because of circumstances, not conduct, which is the line separating it from the Board. The Committee decides placement, whether restoration to family, a children's home or a fit facility, and reviews that placement periodically, with restoration to family stated as the Act's first preference.

The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Amendment Act, 2021 changed the machinery around both institutions without altering their core composition. It moved adoption orders from civil courts to the District Magistrate, to clear a backlog built up under court-based adoption processing, and gave the District Magistrate a standing supervisory role over the District Child Protection Unit and the Committee, including power to act where a Committee is not functioning as the Act requires.