When R* gets into bed and his thoughts drift to the 50 days he spent in the sprawling jail of Tihar here in India’s capital, sleep is hard to come by.

R, now 20, said he remembered cooking and cleaning for the adult convicts and undertrials amongst whom he was forced to live. He remembered how these adults took away the biscuits and food that his parents brought. He remembers sexual assaults on other children, and he remembers many being forced into drugs.

Even though the Supreme Court has called the detention of children “a flagrant violation of the law”—and various court judgement have emphasised the nature of these violations over 41 years—right-to-information data accessed by this writer and reported in August 2023 revealed at least 79 such detentions in police lock-ups nationwide, 61 from Uttar Pradesh alone over five years.

That was clearly an under-estimate.

In 2022, according to a report submitted by the Delhi government to the Delhi High Courts, about 800 children in conflict with the law were detained in jails within the national capital’s Tihar jail system over the preceding five years.

The real number of children detained nationwide are estimated to be in the thousands, indicating endemic violations of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, which clearly says no child “in conflict with the law” can be held in a police lock-up or jail.

Concerned by such egregious violations of the law by its keepers, in January 2024, the National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) launched a nationwide campaign to identify children in prisons and give them legal assistance, a recognition that legal preventive measures had failed to keep children out of jail.

“Jitna hum kam bole utna acha hai (The less I say the better),” said R, a Muslim boy, of his time in jail. “Jail Alag hi duniya hai (Prison is a different world).”


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