The illiteracy penalty too many children are punished for the ‘crime’ of being poorly educated and poor

The illiteracy penalty too many children are punished for the ‘crime’ of being poorly educated and poor

How just is our justice system? NCRB data indicates that it is stacked against the poor and the poorly educated, with ‘literacy’ serving as a useful proxy where data regarding economic status is not available. The disparity starts with the young and continues among the adults. As many as one-third of juveniles apprehended in 2020 had studied only upto the primary level or were illiterate. The profile of prisoners is similar. In 2019, the latest year for which data is available, a jaw-dropping 28% were illiterate and another 42% of them had education below Class X. The two categories taken together accounted for 69% of convicts, 69% of undertrials, and 66% of detenues.

One takeaway of this data is the social costs of letting so many Indian children fall off the education grid. Poor schooling drastically shortens the odds of standard employment and increases those of crime. As the situation has worsened considerably since March 2020, several states need to make a concerted effort to get the ‘lost generation’ back to classrooms. But another takeaway is that there is a class bias in the registration of cases. Better-off children enjoy the benefits of much better legal representation while poorer children fall afoul of the system more easily, and thereafter an ugly recidivist cycle can kick in.

In 2015, when such data was made available by NCRB, a glaring 42% of apprehended juveniles came from families with annual income of upto Rs 25,000. Justice Chandrachud had noted at the time that in our country children often “inherit crime”. From improvement in legal aid to reform of bail, there’s plenty India can do to improve this situation. It must stop holding children in dismal and even unsafe juvenile homes just because they are poor.