The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act 2012 represented a landmark legislative intervention in India’s child protection framework, establishing for the first time a comprehensive, child-friendly legal architecture for the prosecution of sexual offences against persons below the age of eighteen, with mandatory Special Courts, time-bound trial completion within one year, and prohibition on revealing the identity of the child survivor. A decade after its enactment, the Act’s promise remains demonstrably unrealised: the National Crime Records Bureau documents a persistent and widening gap between the volume of POCSO cases registered and the number actually brought to conviction, a pattern that scholars of procedural justice and survivor advocates alike characterise as a systemic failure of the criminal justice process rather than a failure of the legislative framework. The establishment of Fast-Track Special Courts under the Centrally Sponsored Fast-Track Special Court Scheme from October 2019 was the Government’s direct policy response to this conviction deficit, but its effectiveness has not been systematically evaluated across states with heterogeneous implementation fidelity.This paper conducts a comparative judicial performance analysis across twelve Indian states, drawing on NCRB 2020-2023 conviction data, the Supreme Court’s POCSO dashboard, and original court records obtained under the Right to Information Act from state High Court registries. The analysis examines conviction rates, case disposal timelines, attrition rates at each stage of the criminal process (FIR to charge-sheet, charge-sheet to trial commencement, trial to disposal), and the relationship between Fast-Track Special Court operationalisation and conviction outcomes. The legal analysis situates the empirical findings within the framework of Article 15(3) of the Constitution, the Directive Principles on child welfare, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and judicial pronouncements on the right to fair trial of child survivors as interpreted in recent Supreme Court jurisprudence.
reethi Raghavan, Saikumar Nagarajan, Devika Chandrasekhar (Sat,) studied this question.