Opinion: A child who waits years for a hearing has already been heard too late

Periyar taught Tamil Nadu to ask who a system was built for. Anna turned that question into a politics of dignity, and Kalaignar into the insistence that the State must reach the last person first. Apply that test to a child waiting for a POCSO trial, and the answer is shameful. The system, as it stands, was built for files. The child is asked to adjust to the file's timetable, not the other way round.

The figures reported this week are not a sudden accident. More than 18,700 POCSO cases pending across Tamil Nadu, more than half beyond the one-year period the law contemplates, twenty districts told they lack a sanctioned special court, forensic reports arriving after the memory they are meant to support has been cross-examined by time itself. This is what underfunding looks like when it wears a robe. It does not shout. It adjourns.

The incumbent TVK government did not create every part of this backlog, and honesty requires that to be said. But a government is not judged only by what it inherits. It is judged by what it treats as urgent after it inherits it. A roadshow can be arranged in a week. A special court cannot be conjured in a week, which is exactly why the work should have started on the first morning and been reported, district by district, every quarter since.

What would a Dravidian answer look like in practice. First, exclusive POCSO courts wherever pendency crosses one hundred cases, with presiding officers trained in child-sensitive procedure and protected from routine transfer mid-trial. Second, a public forensic clock: every district publishes how many reports are pending beyond thirty, sixty and ninety days, and the officer responsible for each delay is named by post, not by whisper. Third, a support person and counsellor attached at the first statement, not discovered by chance months later, paid by the State and answerable to the child's best interest, not to the convenience of the court diary.

And fourth, the hardest one, political ownership. A minister should stand up once a quarter and read the backlog aloud, the way budgets are read, until the number becomes too embarrassing to repeat without action. Self-respect was never only about who may enter a temple or a street. It is also about whether the smallest citizen, who cannot vote, cannot organise, and cannot wait without harm, is treated by the Republic as a person whose time matters. A child who waits years to be heard has already received the State's first verdict. It is that she can wait. Tamil Nadu should be ashamed to deliver it, and in a hurry to withdraw it.