Measure the Child, Not the Case File: Senior Madhya Pradesh Officer Calls for Outcome-Based Child Protection as Juvenile Justice Act Completes a Decade

Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh) [India], October 13: As the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 completes a decade, Ms. Nidhi Nivedita, Principal Revenue Commissioner and Commissioner, Land Records, Government of Madhya Pradesh, has called for India’s child-protection system to make its next transition: from recording what happened to a child to knowing whether the state’s intervention actually changed that child’s life.

In an article published in The Hindu on September 17, Ms. Nivedita, who earlier served as Commissioner, Women and Child Development, Madhya Pradesh, wrote that the Act’s first decade built a substantial institutional and digital architecture. Child Welfare Committees, Juvenile Justice Boards, District Child Protection Units, Special Juvenile Police Units, Child Care Institutions and helplines now generate large volumes of data on adoption, missing children, restoration, institutional and non-institutional care, sponsorship, foster care and aftercare.

“The problem, therefore, is no longer simply the absence of data,” she wrote. “The more important question is, ‘Do we have the complete story of the child?’”

You Might Be Interested In

Ms. Nivedita proposed that for every child entering the protection system, data should eventually answer seven questions: who the child is, why the child became vulnerable, what was legally required to happen, what intervention was actually provided, what eventually happened to the child, why the system succeeded or failed, and what the child says.