In April last year, the Palamau district administration had promised a team of National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) to get the observation home, built for juveniles in conflict with law to be vacated within three months so that they need not travel 165km to be lodged in Ranchi observation home.
After one and half year, when a member of the State Commission for Protection of Child Rights (SCPCR) visited Daltonganj jail on the directive of National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), he found to his surprise that the situation did not change at all.
And the offenders alongwith their parents found out a crude way to stay back in Daltonganj, little knowing that they with the assistance of police were unwittingly doing great injustice to themselves. SCCPR member Sanjay Mishra, who inspected the Daltonganj central jail last week, said that as many 56 inmates were apparently underage and sharing space with hardened criminals and Naxals.
He said that NCPCR has detected 26 juveniles in conflict with law lodged in Dhanbad jail. According to sources, the parents/guardians of these alleged offenders do not want that their wards be shown as under 18 years of age as then they will be shifted to the observation home in Ranchi, in absence of the one in Palamau, and this will cause enormous hardships to them.
Under the law, the children in conflict with law have to be lodged at Observation Home and face the trial at the Juvenile Justice Board, based in Daltonganj. The police, while lodging an FIR, also make a wrong assessment of age of the offenders so that they too will not be required to accompany them and take them back for trial.
Significantly, Palamau Deputy Commissioner Manoj Kumar also confirmed the grim fact to The Pioneer, saying that persons who look really under 18 years of age are here in the central jail.
The DC said that there should be a fair mechanism to ascertain the age of the accused. Tooth, bone, hair, eye ball, skin all are the deciding factors behind ascertaining the age. Kumar said the matter would be looked properly as to for whose manipulations these people are here if their age is proved less than 18 years.
Mishra said that the action of police authorities in understating the age of the offenders and the court also mechanically remanding them to judicial custody is a great injustice to the children.
Under the Juvenile Justice Act, the investigation report has to be filed within 60 days in cases where the alleged offence is liable for a punishment of less than seven years and, within 90 days in cases involving a punishment of seven or more years.
"But it will take years for them once they have been treated as adults. Moreover, most of the juvenile offenders have been booked under heinous charges of murder, attempt to murder and even waging war against the State," he pointed out.
The SCPCR member said that he had asked the DC to shift the Kasturba Gandhi Girls' School running in the observation home to its own building by January 15. "The inmates who are apparently juvenile will be medically examined," he added.
What happened was this. The Palamau branch of Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya (KGBV) started in December 2005. As there was no building, it took over the existing boys' observation home, right beside the district jail.
And the juvenile boys in conflict with the law had no other option but to travel 165 km to be lodged at the Ranchi observation home, a process that needlessly delayed their getting justice.
In April, when a team of NCPCR headed by Yogesh Dube visited, he was shocked to find the Kasturba Gandhi school running from an observation home in Daltonganj.
He called this a gross violation of child rights and gave a three-month deadline to the administration to build a new school elsewhere, finish it and get the girls in.
The then Deputy commissioner Pooja Singhal had assured that the cradle would shift to its new building 10km away from the remand home by June 15. Officially, the State has eight observation homes for boys and two for girls.