Institutional Silos And Systemic Fragmentation: A Study Of Convergence Failure Among Child Protection Bodies In Delhi
- IJLLR Journal
- Aug 4
- 2 min read
Wasi Ullah, Research Scholar, Hamdard Institute of Legal Studies and Research, Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi
ABSTRACT
The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, distributes responsibility for children in conflict with law (CCL) across at least five statutory bodies: the Juvenile Justice Board, the Child Welfare Committee, the District Child Protection Unit, the Special Juvenile Police Unit, and the probation apparatus, each answerable to a different administrative hierarchy. This article argues that the persistent implementation failures documented in Delhi over the past decade are better explained as failures of inter- institutional convergence than as failures of statutory design or of any single institution's capacity. It develops this claim in three steps. First, it distinguishes structural convergence (shared data, formal linkages, joint accountability) from relational convergence (trust, common professional norms, informal coordination), building on the collaborative-governance and street-level bureaucracy literatures. Second, it traces how constitutional courts, most significantly the Supreme Court in Sampurna Behura v. Union of India, and, at the district level, the Delhi High Court's own coordination- focused orders have judicially recognised this deficit without resolving it. Third, it locates the deficit's structural causes in divergent administrative hierarchies, chronic vacancy in the coordinating layer, an absence of shared data infrastructure, and misaligned professional incentives, and proposes a sequenced, feasibility-ranked reform agenda centred on the interfaces between institutions rather than on further amendment of the Act's substantive text. The article is offered as the doctrinal, theoretical and secondary-evidentiary foundation for a companion empirical study of selected Delhi districts, whose research protocol is set out in the Appendix.
Keywords: Juvenile Justice Act 2015; Child Welfare Committee; Juvenile Justice Board; District Child Protection Unit; collaborative governance; institutional convergence; Delhi.
