POCSO case: Delhi HC rejects doubts over homeless minor’s testimony in case

The Delhi High Court has refused to interfere with the conviction of a man accused of sodomising an 11-year-old homeless boy, asserting that a child surviving on the streets cannot be expected to share details of date, time or clothing with the same accuracy as a witness living in a settled environment.

In a judgement passed on the accused’s appeal on August 10, Justice Chandrasekharan Sudha upheld the trial court’s August 2025 decision to convict him under Section 377 (unnatural offences) IPC and Section 6 (Punishment for aggravated penetrative sexual assault) of the POCSO Act.

The judge, however, modified the trial court’s 20-year jail term to ten years on the grounds that at the time of the offence, the corresponding sentence was a decade.

Section 6 POCSO Act became punishable with a minimum term of 20 years with effect from August 16, 2019. The minor alleged that in November 2016, the accused sexually assaulted him while he was sleeping under a railway bridge at Kashmere Gate.

The incident was reported on the police helpline by some social workers, who had organised a programme in the area for providing free medical aid to the homeless, after the minor informed them about it.

The accused’s counsel claimed that he had been falsely implicated. He argued that the prosecution failed to prove the boy was under 12 years of age and that there were several inconsistencies in his testimony regarding the incident and the dress he was wearing.

Rejecting the defence, the court said the boy’s inability to state his exact age or date of birth or other specific details would not benefit the accused. It said although in his testimony, the survivor claimed that he was about 15 years of age, given his social background, it was “unrealistic” to expect him to know his exact age.

The school record showed his date of birth as October 12, 2005, making him 11 years old at the time of the incident, the court observed.

The court stated that the accused’s identity, the place of incident, the nature of the sexual assault and the sequence of events immediately after the incident remained substantially unchanged throughout all versions testified by the minor boy.

The discrepancies with respect to the exact time, the description and colour of the clothes worn by the boy, the precise order in which the NGO workers and the police reached the spot, etc, do not “detract from the consistent allegation of forcible anal intercourse”, it stated.

The court also held that the absence of any external injuries on the minor was not sufficient to discredit his otherwise “consistent and trustworthy testimony”.

“The evidence on record reveals that PW1 was a homeless child living on the streets and earning his livelihood by rag-picking. In such circumstances, it would be unrealistic to expect him to possess exact knowledge of his date of birth or to narrate every detail of the incident with mathematical accuracy,” observed the court.

“Minor discrepancies, omissions or improvements, which do not go to the root of the prosecution case, are natural consequences of normal errors of observation and memory, particularly when a child witness recounts a traumatic incident after a lapse of time. It must also be borne in mind that PW1 was a homeless child surviving on the streets and engaged in rag-picking and cannot be expected to give precise particulars regarding dates, time or clothing with the same degree of accuracy as a witness living in a settled environment,” the court said.