He started breaking into houses in Anand Vihar and Preet Vihar in East Delhi, from which he would steal taps and other fittings that, in all likelihood, owners would not bother to lodge police complaints about. He would sell these to scrap dealers for Rs 280 a kilo.
“On the day my father died I was out stealing,” he says, tears gathering in the corner of his eyes. “I was so gone that I even stole the taps from the dispensary where my uncle had organised a memorial meeting for him.”
He would usually steal alone, but one day “after having smack” he and a friend got greedy. “We decided to show everyone how much we could steal,” he says. The police foiled that plan.
He was released after three months, cured of his addiction. Four days later, he was back with the gang. Now he is scared of leaving the observation home. “Strange thoughts come into my mind. At times, I want to kill my mother,” he says, “I know I’ll end up returning to them (the gang) if I leave.”
Delhi Police’s Suman Nalwa blames the provisions of the Juvenile Justice Act for this. The rules require that children who are caught for crimes that, in the case of adults, entail a sentence of less than seven years be released from the police station, while the details of their cases are passed onto the Juvenile Justice Board. All theft irrespective of its scale, including stealing automobiles, comes under this category. In these cases, evidence must be presented to the board within three months, otherwise the case is closed. “The most we can do is beat these juveniles a bit and then let them off,” confesses a Juvenile Welfare Officer (JWO) posted in South Delhi.
“The children from these gangs just disappear,” says Nalwa, “only to appear after three months when the cases against them have been closed. This is very convenient for me, since it reduces my crimes statistics, but it’s completely ridiculous.”
The Juvenile Justice Board in Delhi does not allow the police to maintain data on juvenile crime that is not ‘heinous’. So, says Nalwa, “we have little to go on, we don’t even know what the extent of the disease is.”
Just how extensively the system can be misused and manipulated is evident from the bleakly comic story of a boy who now works as a driver in North Delhi.
He says he was introduced to drugs like ganja and eraser fluids when he was 10, at his government school in Delhi. Over the years the habit became worse, the drugs became harder, he dropped out of school, and started working at a mechanic’s workshop. He was first arrested in 2010 for stabbing someone. “I kept very bad company,” he says with a disarming honesty, “but they had prepared me for such an eventuality.”
He was, at this time, 19 years old, but told the police he was 17. A ‘bone age’ test was ordered. “My parents bribed the investigating officer, who, in turn, got the doctors to fiddle the report.”
