On this Children’s Day, we stand at an inflection point in operationalising child protection.
Marking the 10th anniversary of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 (JJ Act), which is the country’s North Star legislation for protecting minors, the Supreme Court convened its national annual consultation in October. This year, the theme was to reflect on a decade of JJ Act with special focus on the children in need of care and protection (CNCP). One of the key takeaways was the call for de-institutionalisation of children and the reintegration of children with their families.
Yet, as the State embraces family reintegration, we must pause and ask a fundamental question: is this push driven by the prism of ‘best interests of the child’?
The momentum behind mandatory family repatriation did not emerge from a deliberate, well-consulted child welfare practice. In India, it was born on September 26, 2020, during the peak of the COVID-19 lockdown, when panic over viral contamination prompted emergency directives across India to clear out protection homes. The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) issued a directive to repatriate over 1,84,000 children across eight states (Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Mizoram, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra and Meghalaya) back to their families. The Supreme Court took suo motu cognizance of this directive and questioned NCPCR too.
Mainstreaming an emergency lockdown directive into standard child protection practice in normal times without intensive assessment or safeguards could be hasty and (in some cases) send the child back into harm’s way. While family-based care is ideal, treating the biological family as inherently financially stable and safe reflects a rather romanticised view of domestic spaces.
The Supreme Court, back in 2020, had questioned the NCPCR directive and further mandated safeguards and individualised steps before repatriation such as assessment of every child’s situation individually, repatriation, scoping and prospecting of the family’s ability to take care of the child. It also laid guidelines like strengthened monitoring of child care institutions, proper facilities and training of the staff at child care homes so as to understand the needs of children. Many child protection champions point out that a CNCP is not uplifted in isolation; the natal family (or the family the child is situated in) needs to be uplifted too by linking the family with all the social protection programmes and entitlements of the State.
Enough literature, including studies by leading sociologists like Ravneet Kaur, underscores that while families are the sites for socialisation, negotiation and developing adolescent agency, these homes are neither homogenous nor universally protective. Many families are financially unstable or deeply abusive, while others are structurally incapable of securing a child’s best interests, regardless of their love and affection towards the child.
Additionally, frontline workers’ strength and capacity to assess and prospect families before rushing into reunification is inadequate. In development intervention, humanitarian law and medicine, the fundamental principle is “do no harm”. If a family views a child primarily as cheap labour, merely two hands to earn, rather than a human being to be nurtured, returning that child to such a family would be an act of cruelty and abandonment.
A similar danger exists in extended families and foster families where State-sanctioned stipends are pocketed by distant relatives and vulnerable children are subjected to exploitation and mistreatment. This reality echoes in popular culture too, which offers stark warnings against blind institutional or familial trust. In the Amol Gupte directed Hindi film Stanley Ka Dabba, a cheerful schoolboy’s hidden ordeal reveals that he is an orphan subjected to domestic abuse, forced labour by his uncle. The film illustrates how extended familial structures can become sites of intentional and brutal exploitation. On the other hand, the Oscar-winning film Spotlight exposes how institutional authority and societal silence conspire to conceal systematic harm against already vulnerable children, reminding us that it takes a village to raise a child and it takes a village to ruin one too, through apathy.
Child protection cannot be treated as the straight and narrow business of one single government department, one vertical; it is the collective responsibility of the State, society and the community. When the village ignores the child’s plight, it actively participates in enabling the child’s destruction, both physically and mentally.
According to the Indian Alternative Care Network (IACN), a network of practitioner-researchers advocating alternate care beyond institutions, nearly 1.5 million children reside in institutional care in India at any given point of time. What is to become of these 1.5 million children? Are they to be just repatriated into unprepared or hostile homes? Additionally, there is the challenge of older adolescents and disabled children in child care institutions who barely get adopted. This question demands a firm pause and a re-thinking of what child care truly is for such children. For these children, child care institutions (CCIs) remain an indispensable lifeline.
The solution is not to dismantle CCIs, but to re-imagine them. Justice K Chandru, while reviewing CCIs in Tamil Nadu following a fatal instance of institutional negligence, spotlighted the problems in CCIs, such as lack of sanitation, recreational facilities, staffing and training. But he never called for shutting down the CCIs completely. Instead, he urged the State to re-imagine them, as places of hope where children get a real chance to achieve their maximum potential. CCIs must be transformed into open shelters which are transparent, accountable spaces, where children’s parents can visit, institutionalised children receive quality education, quality healthcare, build emotional resilience and gain meaningful vocational training.
The extreme class bias in normalising State-run care homes as dilapidated, underfunded and understaffed places where the most vulnerable children come, needs to be challenged too. Under-investing in State-run care facilities and refusing to inflation index the allocations perpetuates class inequality, normalising the practice that poor children deserve substandard conditions simply because they are poor and their parents lack voice and agency.
Between the fiscal years 2015-16 to 2025-26, the Ministry of Women and Child Development’s expenditure has grown at an annual average rate of 4%. In proportion to the total expenditure by the Central government, however, the Ministry's expenditure declined from 0.96% in 2015-16 to 0.5% in 2025-26 as per analysis done by PRS Legislative Research. While the Union Budget 2026–27 has allocated ₹1,550 crore to Mission Vatsalya (the flagship child protection programme of the government), this figure needs skilled and adequate frontline cadre to be absorbing the funds meaningfully to deliver child protection to every deserving child at the last mile.
The State runs the risk of failing its children if it chooses administrative convenience, withdrawal/exit over meaningful public investment. Sweeping repatriation directives during emergencies must not become an excuse for the State to abandon its welfare duties in health, education, essential nutrition, well-being, access to justice and child protection. Moving forward, CCIs must be maintained alongside family integration and strengthening. CCIs and children placed back in families (natal or extended or alternate care) should have a reliable and responsive channel to reach out via child-friendly complaint mechanisms. And the CCIs should be subject to independent monitoring.
As we celebrate Children’s Day, we must reclaim the definition of the ‘best interest of the child’, and the State and society must ensure whatever works best for the child - natal family, extended family, foster family or CCIs - whichever option really guarantees hope and life chances to children in especially difficult circumstances, to reach their maximum potential.
Biraj Swain is the Chief Minister's Chair Professor cum Director of Centre for Child Rights at the National Law University Odisha (NLUO).
Aryan Chowdhury and Utsav Biswas are currently students of NLUO.