The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: India will need at least nine years to clear the backlog of cases pending under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, finds a new study.
A study by the India Child Protection Fund (ICPF), titled ‘Justice Awaits: An Analysis of the Efficacy of Justice Delivery Mechanisms in Cases of Child Sexual Abuse in India’, said that only 3% of cases under the POCSO Act resulted in convictions in 2022.
The Ministry of Women and Child Development had in 2019 announced that the government would set up these fast-track courts using the ‘Nirbhaya Fund’. These courts were aimed at exclusively dealing with cases under POCSO.
At that time, legal and child rights experts had cautioned that merely setting up fast-track courts would not help unless more judges were appointed or public prosecutors trained and sensitised to deal with such cases.
As per the ICPF study, each of the over 1,000 such courts in the country are clearing only 28 cases on average every year, falling short of the target of 165, the Hindu reported.
In Maharashtra, it might take up to 2036 for a child to get justice in a POCSO case. By January this year, the state had 33,073 such cases pending in the fast-track courts, Deccan Herald reported, citing the study.
In states such as Arunachal Pradesh and Bihar, it could take more than 25 years to bring the pending cases to closure, the report noted.
In Andhra Pradesh, a complainant will have to wait till 2034 as the state has 8,137 pending cases, while in Rajasthan and Jharkhand, it will take till 2033, with 8,921 and 4,408 cases, respectively, the daily reported.
Overall, on an average, only 28 POCSO cases were disposed of by each fast track special court (FTSC) in 2022. And India has a total of 2.43 lakh POCSO cases pending in its fast track courts, as on January 2023.
The average expenditure for the disposal of each case was Rs 2.73 lakh, the newspaper said.
Karnataka (919) and Goa (62) are the two states with the least number of pending cases. A complainant can hope for justice by 2024 in these states, the report added.