With over 2.43 lakh POCSO cases pending trial in Fast Track Special Courts (FTSCs) as of January 31, 2023, a new research paper by the India Child Protection Fund (ICPF) has estimated that each of the over 1,000 such courts in the country are currently clearing just 28 cases on average every year, as opposed to the initially envisioned 165 cases per year.
FTSCs were set up in 2019, specifically for trying cases related to sexual offences, particularly those under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. The idea was to allow these special courts to exclusively deal with these cases in order to fulfil the mandate of finishing trial in one year.
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However, the research paper, titled ‘Justice Awaits: An Analysis of the Efficacy of Justice Delivery Mechanisms in Cases of Child Sexual Abuse in India’, estimated that under the current pendency rates, Arunachal Pradesh would take 30 years for trial in all pending POCSO cases to come to a close. Similarly, it would take Delhi 27 years, Bihar 26 years, West Bengal 25 years, Uttar Pradesh 22 years, and Meghalaya 21 years to clear their respective backlogs in POCSO cases.
It also said, “Each FTSC was expected to dispose of 41-42 cases in a quarter and at least 165 in a year. The data suggests that FTSCs are unable to achieve the set targets even after three years of the launch of the scheme.”
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‘Low conviction rate’
“The scheme was supposed to deliver the legal mandate for the completion of trial of such cases within one year and yet out of the total 2,68,038 cases that were under trial, only 8,909 cases resulted in conviction,” a statement from the ICPF said.
The Delhi-based ICPF, which is a non-profit working against online sexual exploitation of children, said that this report is based on data from the Ministry of Law and Justice, Ministry of Women and Child Development and National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), which released the latest crime statistics for 2022 just last week.
The findings of the paper cast a huge question mark on the efficacy of the country’s judicial system, the ICPF said, adding that this was despite the 2019 decision to set up the courts and the government allocating crores for this purpose in the three years since.
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In a set of recommendations to deal with the pendency of POCSO cases in FTSCs, the research paper suggested that the first step would be to ensure all FTSCs are made operational and that a framework should be set up to monitor their functioning based on their output. It also suggested more FTSCs should be established and that a dashboard for these courts should be made public for transparency.
It added that all FTSC staff — from the level of investigation (that is, police personnel) to the judges — should be exclusively working with these courts so the cases can be prioritised.
