Fast track courts disposing of just 28 POCSO cases per year on average: research paper

FTSCs set up in 2019 to exclusively try POCSO cases have failed to meet their targets, with each court clearing just 28 cases/yr. Arunachal Pradesh would take 30 yrs to clear its backlog, Delhi 27 yrs, Bihar 26 yrs, West Bengal 25 yrs, UP 22 yrs & Meghalaya 21 yrs. ICPF suggests monitoring FTSCs, setting up more courts & making staff exclusively work with them to prioritize cases.

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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“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.