The Child Welfare Committee

In one line

The Committee is to the child in need of care and protection what the Board is to the child in conflict with law.

In exam wording: sections 27 to 30 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 provide for the constitution, composition, procedure, powers, functions and responsibilities of the Child Welfare Committee.

Why the law has this at all

The Act deals with two kinds of children and it would have been simpler to give them to one authority. It does not, and the reason is that the two jobs are different in kind.

The Board's work is adjudicative. Something is alleged, an inquiry establishes whether it happened, and an order follows. It ends.

The Committee's work is administrative and continuing. A child is found on a street. Nobody has accused him of anything. What is needed is not a finding but a series of decisions taken over months: where he sleeps tonight, whether his family can be traced, whether they are fit, whether he should be in foster care, whether he is legally free for adoption, whether the institution he is in is being run properly. That is why the Committee meets at least twenty days a month while the Board sits as a court, and why an inspection visit counts as a sitting.

And yet the Committee has to be able to bind people, because deciding where a child lives affects parents, institutions and the police. So section 27(9) gives a body of five people, none of whom need be a lawyer, the powers of a Judicial Magistrate of the First Class. That combination, a welfare body with magisterial powers, is the distinctive thing about the Committee, and it is the reason the 2021 amendment placed the District Magistrate over it, for review and for grievances.

Some words this chapter uses

Surrender deed is the document by which a parent or guardian relinquishes a child to the Committee.

Legally free for adoption is the declaration under section 38 that makes a child adoptable.

Suo motu means on its own motion, without anybody bringing the matter.

Section 27: constitution and composition

Sub-section (1). The State Government shall, by notification in the Official Gazette, constitute for every district one or more Child Welfare Committees for exercising the powers and discharging the duties conferred on them in relation to children in need of care and protection, and shall ensure that induction training and sensitisation of all members is provided within two months from the date of notification.

Sub-section (2), composition. The Committee shall consist of a Chairperson and four other members as the State Government thinks fit to appoint, of whom at least one shall be a woman and another an expert on the matters concerning children.