Abstract
India (officially the Republic of India) is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean to the south, the Arabian Sea to the southwest and the Bay of Bengal to the southeast, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west, China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the northeast, and Burma (Myanmar) and Bangladesh to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives; in addition, India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand and Indonesia.
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Notes
- 1.
Children in difficult circumstances include orphans, abandoned children, destitute children, working and street children, victims of natural calamities, emergencies or human-made disasters, children with disabilities, AIDS-affected children, children engaged in substance abuse, children of sex workers, juvenile offenders or children in conflict with the law, ‘children of families at risk’ like refugees, migrant and construction workers, chronically or terminally ill, prisoners or lifers, single parent or the girl child.
- 2.
JJ Act, Articles 4–7. JJBs were first constituted as per the provisions of JJ Act 2000. These bodies were also made available as per Central Children’s Act, 1960. However the composition of these boards got changed in JJ Act, 2000.
- 3.
JJ Act, Chapter 2, § 4(2) (indicating that a JJB ‘shall consist of a Metropolitan Magistrate or a Judicial Magistrate of the first class, as the case may be, and two social workers of whom at least one shall be a woman’).
- 4.
Inquiries are generally required to be completed within four months: JJ Act, Chapter 2, § 14.
- 5.
JJ Act, Chapter 5, § 63.
- 6.
Model Rules under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2000, 2007, Gen. S. R. & O. 679(E), available at http://wcd.nic.in (date accessed 4 January 2016) (hereinafter the Model Rules).
- 7.
See e.g. Nair (2009), quoting a children’s rights activist in India as stating that ‘Children’s rights are being constantly violated under the purview of the juvenile justice system’, with several cases in the city of Goa pending since 2002.
- 8.
This chapter draws directly on the knowledge and experiences of the two authors, who have worked directly in these settings.
References
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Vesvikar, M., Sharma, R. (2016). The Juvenile Justice System in India: Observation Homes and Current Debates. In: Arnull, E., Fox, D. (eds) Cultural Perspectives on Youth Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43397-8_8
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