All those young people lied?
SO, it has been decided that the twenty juveniles who complained about being abused by the management of a correctional centre recently were not speaking the truth. Again, the management, despite all that evidence of wrongdoing on the part of its members, has been given a clean chit.
Something is going truly wrong at the Tongi Juvenile Development Centre, where the young people in question recently subjected themselves to physical pain as a way of drawing attention to their miseries. Now the management would like us to believe, and with them the committee which went into an inquiry once the matter became public, that the twenty juveniles were incensed that the authorities were trying to get them out of the drug habit. A simple question comes up here: why did the management not raise the drugs issue when the scandal broke in the media? If so many young people at a correctional centre are actually into drugs, it is the correctional centre which needs to be subjected to correction. One wonders why the probe committee ignored this aspect of the issue.
The National Human Rights Commission and the media have reported on the evidence related to the abuse of the young at the Tongi centre. It should have been for the committee members to speak to the NHRC and journalists, besides the officials and inmates of the centre, who visited the centre once the reports of abuse first surfaced.
A fresh, impartial inquiry is called for. The one which has just been submitted raises more questions than it has been able to answer.
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