‘Low rate of disposal of POCSO cases by fast-track courts’

💫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.

💫The FTSCs were set up in 2019, specifically for trying cases related to sexual offences, those under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. The idea was to allow these special courts to deal with these cases to fulfil the mandate of finishing the trial in one year. 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.

💫“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 findings cast a question mark on the efficacy of the country’s judicial system, the ICPF said.