Who Gets to Skip the Queue? Fast-Tracking and the Limits of Legitimate Priority

Who Gets to Skip the Queue? Fast-Tracking and the Limits of Legitimate Priority

Why Are Some Cases Fast-Tracked? Vulnerability, Safety, Statutory Mandates and Constitutionally Defensible Triage

 

The Practical Question

A POCSO trial can be listed for evidence within weeks; a routine cheque-bounce matter filed the same day may wait years. Both litigants stand before the same Constitution, in the same overburdened court system. The practical question this raises is not whether urgency is ever justified, but on what basis one case may lawfully overtake another, who decides that basis, and whether it can survive scrutiny once the public attention that first drew attention to a case has moved elsewhere. Thousands of families approach police stations, Child Welfare Committees and Special Courts each year convinced that their case is exceptional. Very few of them are wrong about the harm; almost none can explain why their case did, or did not, receive priority. That gap is what this article examines.

The Statutory Mandate

Parliament itself answers part of the question. Section 35 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 sets a thirty-day goal for recording the child’s evidence and a one-year goal, running from the date of cognizance, for completing the trial[1]. Section 28 requires every State to designate a Special Court for this purpose in each district[2], and Section 33 layers in child-friendly trial procedure — frequent breaks, restrictions on aggressive cross-examination, and a prohibition on the child being called repeatedly to testify[3]. These are not discretionary preferences that a court may apply if convenient; they are legislative findings, embedded directly in the statute, that delay itself causes harm to a child witness, and that the Act’s own protective machinery — in-camera proceedings, statutory presumptions[4], restrictions on the child facing the accused — depends on the case moving while memory and testimony remain reliable.

It helps to be precise about vocabulary that is often used loosely. A POCSO Special Court is any court so designated under Section 28, and every district is required to have one. An exclusive POCSO Court is a Special Court that hears only POCSO matters and nothing else, freeing it from the docket pressure of an ordinary sessions court. A Fast Track Special Court, in turn, is a court created under the Union Government’s Centrally Sponsored FTSC Scheme, funded through the Nirbhaya Fund, which may itself be constituted as an exclusive POCSO Court [5]where district pendency justifies the additional resource. The three categories overlap in practice but are not synonyms: a district can have a POCSO Special Court that is neither exclusive nor centrally funded, and the label ‘fast track’ describes a funding and administrative mechanism, not an automatic guarantee that any particular case will move quickly. Confusing the three is not a merely academic error — it lets a State claim compliance with the Supreme Court’s directions on paper by pointing to Special Courts that were never given the exclusivity or resources the fast-track scheme intends.

Where the Priority Criteria Actually Come From

The clearest judicial articulation of triage criteria for this sector came not from the POCSO Act itself but from the Supreme Court’s continuing supervision of its implementation. In 2019, acting on news reports of a sharp rise in reported child rape cases, the Court registered a suo motu writ petition titled In Re: Alarming Rise in the Number of Reported Child Rape Incidents and appointed a senior counsel as amicus curiae to assist in framing directions. In its order of 16 December 2019, the Court laid down an objective parameter: every district with more than one hundred pending POCSO cases must have at least one exclusive POCSO Court. That is triage in its proper sense — a rule fixed in advance, applied uniformly across every State, and defensible to a litigant who is not first in the queue precisely because the criterion, not their case’s visibility, decided the outcome. The Court has continued to monitor compliance in the years since, and hearings as recent as 2025 recorded the amicus curiae flagging continued shortfalls: States that had notified exclusive POCSO Courts on paper without appointing the judicial officers or support staff needed to make those courts functional in fact.

This is worth dwelling on because it illustrates the difference between a triage criterion and a triage outcome. A published, numerical threshold is a criterion; it can be checked, audited and challenged if applied inconsistently. Whether a State has actually complied with it is a separate question of institutional will and budget, and the Supreme Court’s own continuing hearings show that the two do not automatically move together. A justice system can have excellent triage rules and still deliver poor triage in practice if the underlying capacity is never funded.

The Constitutional Backdrop

Speedy trial has been read into Article 21 since the Supreme Court’s decision in Hussainara Khatoon v State of Bihar, which held that a criminal procedure resulting in prolonged, unexplained detention or delay cannot be ‘reasonable, fair or just’ within the meaning of that Article[6]. The Court returned to the question of access more broadly in Anita Kushwaha v Pushap Sudan, where a Constitution Bench identified four facets that together constitute access to justice: an effective adjudicatory mechanism, reasonable physical accessibility, affordability, and — critically for this discussion — a speedy process of adjudication, holding that these facets flow from Articles 14 and 21 read together[7]. On this reading, delay is not merely regrettable administration; an unreasonably slow process can itself amount to a constitutional deprivation, regardless of which category of case is involved.

At the same time, the Court has been equally clear that this cannot be converted into a rigid, one-size-fits-all deadline. In P Ramachandra Rao v State of Karnataka, a Constitution Bench overruled its own earlier attempt to prescribe fixed outer time limits for the conclusion of different categories of criminal trial, holding that circumstances legitimately vary from case to case and cannot be flattened into a single mechanical number applicable to every proceeding. Read together, Hussainara Khatoon, Anita Kushwaha and P Ramachandra Rao frame the real constitutional demand with some precision: equal protection under Article 14 does not require identical treatment of every case regardless of its facts, but it does require that any differential speed be tied to an articulable, reviewable reason — vulnerability, safety, evidentiary urgency, a statutory mandate — rather than to which case happened to attract the most attention outside the courtroom.

 

Constitutionally Defensible Triage, Not Ad Hoc Exception

The Supreme Court supplied a method for operationalising this distinction in Imtiyaz Ahmad v State of Uttar Pradesh, where it directed the Law Commission of India to examine the classification of pending criminal cases by category and to recommend objective norms for prioritising disposal, rather than leaving urgency to be decided case by case on the loudest complaint before a particular Bench. Applied to POCSO matters, this is the difference between a fast-track order because a case is a child sexual-offence matter falling within a published category, and a fast-track order because a protest outside a court gate or a trending hashtag made a particular case impossible for the administration to ignore. The first is triage; the second is queue-jumping dressed as urgency, and it is unfair precisely to the equally vulnerable child whose case never went viral and whose family lacks the resources, literacy or media contacts to generate similar pressure.

POCSO is not alone in building statutory urgency into its design; comparing it with parallel triage systems is instructive. Section 12(5) of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 directs a Magistrate to endeavour to dispose of an application within sixty days of first hearing. Section 5(4) of the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007 requires a Tribunal to dispose of a maintenance application within ninety days, because an elderly applicant’s need cannot wait out an ordinary civil docket. The Commercial Courts Act, 2015 imposes strict case-management timelines on high-value commercial disputes for different reasons — predictability for business and India’s ease-of-doing-business ranking. None of these statutes were enacted because affected litigants protested; each reflects a prior legislative judgment that a defined category of dispute carries a cost of delay that ordinary queue position does not price in. POCSO’s urgency belongs in this company: one instance of a broader, constitutionally unremarkable principle that Parliament may lawfully sort cases by category, provided the sorting rule is public, general and tied to the nature of the harm rather than to a litigant’s visibility.

 

Is the Fast Track Actually Fast? What the Data Shows

As of 30 June 2026, 779 Fast Track Special Courts were functional across 29 States and Union Territories, of which 399 were exclusive POCSO Courts, under a scheme originally sanctioned for 790 such courts and most recently extended to 30 September 2026 pending a decision on longer-term continuation.[8]

The trend across these three years is instructive, and somewhat sobering for anyone tempted to treat the existence of a scheme as proof that the underlying problem has been solved. Registrations rose from roughly 81,000 in 2023 to nearly 144,000 in 2025 [9]— an increase of almost seventy per cent — while annual disposals actually fell over the same period, from around 85,600 in 2024 to about 66,500 in 2025. Year-end pendency climbed steadily, from roughly 202,000 cases in 2023 to nearly 246,000 by the end of 2025. A scheme built specifically to accelerate a defined, statutorily urgent category of cases is itself accumulating backlog faster than it can clear it — which means that even a case correctly triaged under every published criterion can still face years of delay once it is inside the fast-track system. This matters for the argument being made here: priority criteria, however carefully designed and constitutionally defensible, cannot substitute for adequate judicial strength, trained Special Public Prosecutors, functioning forensic laboratories and support-staff sanctioned in fact rather than only on paper. A triage rule tells the system where to send a case first; it does not, by itself, create the capacity to receive it.

 

What Triage Does Not Touch: Rights in the Courtroom

Speed is a scheduling question, not a verdict, and the two should never be allowed to blur into each other. Statutory presumptions under Sections 29 and 30 of the POCSO Act shift specific evidentiary burdens onto the accused once certain foundational facts are proved by the prosecution, but they do not dispense with the prosecution’s obligation to establish those foundational facts in the first place, and they have consistently been read by courts as compatible with, rather than a departure from, the presumption of innocence that otherwise governs criminal trials. An accused person facing a fast-tracked case retains the same right to cross-examine witnesses, the same right to a reasoned judgment addressing the evidence actually led, and the same entitlement to bail considered on its own merits, as an accused person whose trial proceeds through the ordinary docket.

A child witness, correspondingly, is entitled to testify without facing the accused, to the assistance of a support person, and to the other protections Chapter VII of the Act provides, irrespective of whether the case reached the Special Court through routine allocation or urgent listing driven by a hundred-case district threshold. The danger worth naming explicitly is the quiet conflation of urgency with a presumption of guilt: a case that has been prioritised for hearing has been prioritised for a fair and prompt hearing, not for a particular outcome, and any editorial or administrative pressure that treats fast-tracking as a substitute for proof undermines the very legitimacy that makes fast-tracking constitutionally defensible in the first place.

 

The Protest Problem: Why Publicity Cannot Be the Criterion

None of this is an argument against public attention as such. Protest, investigative reporting and sustained civil-society pressure have, on the historical record, been what actually produced reform: public outrage following a series of reported incidents led the Supreme Court to register its 2019 Suo motu petition, and continued monitoring by journalists and advocacy groups is a large part of why the Court’s amicus has flagged non-compliance years later. The difficulty is not that protest exposes institutional failure — it should, and often only it does — but that a system which responds only to protest has quietly redefined ‘priority’ as ‘visibility’, a criterion no litigant can be told about in advance, no lawyer can advise a client to rely on, and no similarly situated family without a social-media following or political connection can access on demand. A family in a remote district, unable to travel to the state capital and represented by a legal aid lawyer with forty other files, is not less entitled to urgency than a family whose case becomes a television story; under a properly designed triage system, both should receive identical priority because both satisfy the same published criteria. Where they do not, the honest diagnosis is not that too many people are protesting, but that too few institutions have made it unnecessary.

 

Realistic Reform

Several changes are achievable without new legislation. First, every High Court could publish the district-wise pendency data and triage thresholds it already collects internally, so a litigant, lawyer or journalist can verify where a district stands against the hundred-case benchmark rather than inferring priority from outcomes after the fact. Second, the classification exercise the Supreme Court contemplated in Imtiyaz Ahmad could be extended specifically to child sexual-offence matters, fixing objective sub-categories within POCSO itself — custodial risk, minor age brackets, imminent risk of evidence degradation — rather than leaving each Special Court to weigh these factors informally.

Third, capacity must track the criteria rather than trail behind them: sanctioning an exclusive POCSO Court on paper without a posted judicial officer or support staff, a gap several State replies to Parliament continue to disclose, makes the published criterion meaningless where it is needed most.

Fourth, a simple digital case-tracking layer over existing court systems — flagging approaching Section 35 deadlines, unresolved forensic requests and overdue compensation orders automatically — would convert a paper timeline into an operational one at negligible cost. None of this requires Parliament to legislate again; it requires the executive and the judiciary to treat obligations that already exist as binding rather than aspirational.

 

Conclusion

Fast-tracking POCSO cases is not a departure from equal justice; properly understood, it is what equal justice actually requires once the law has decided, in advance and for stated reasons, that a defined category of victims cannot safely wait behind an ordinary docket. The constitutional risk identified in this article lies elsewhere — not in the existence of urgency, but in letting visibility, rather than a published and reviewable rule, decide who receives it. The data on Fast Track Special Courts shows that even a lawful triage rule is only as good as the capacity behind it, and the comparison with the Domestic Violence Act, the Senior Citizens Act and the Commercial Courts Act shows that principled, category-based urgency is a familiar and constitutionally unremarkable feature of Indian law, not an exception invented for headline cases. A justice system earns its legitimacy not from the cases it expedites under pressure, but from the ordinary cases — filed by families with no cameras outside their door — that it also manages to move within a reasonable time, for no reason other than that the law already said it should.

 

 

 

 

 

References

1. Statutes

Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, ss 28, 29, 30, 33, 35.

Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, s 12(5).

Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007, s 5(4).

Commercial Courts Act, 2015.

 

2. Cases

Hussainara Khatoon v State of Bihar, (1980) 1 SCC 98.

P Ramachandra Rao v State of Karnataka, (2002) 4 SCC 578.

Anita Kushwaha v Pushap Sudan, (2016) 8 SCC 509.

Imtiyaz Ahmad v State of Uttar Pradesh, (2012) 2 SCC 688.

In Re: Alarming Rise in the Number of Reported Child Rape Incidents, Suo Motu Writ Petition (Criminal) No. 1 of 2019, Order dated 16 December 2019.

 

3. Reports and Official Data

Ministry of Law and Justice, reply in the Rajya Sabha on Fast Track Special Courts functional as of 30 June 2026 (779 FTSCs, including 399 exclusive POCSO Courts, across 29 States/UTs).

Ministry of Law and Justice, FTSC case registration, disposal and pendency data for 2023, 2024 and 2025, furnished to Parliament.

Department of Justice, Fast Track Special Courts Scheme guidelines and scheme extension notifications, 2019-2026.

[1] Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, s 35.

[2] Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, s 28.

[3] Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, s 33.

[4] Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, ss 29, 30.

[5] In Re: Alarming Rise in the Number of Reported Child Rape Incidents, Suo Motu Writ Petition (Criminal) No. 1 of 2019, Order dated 16 December 2019.

[6] Hussainara Khatoon v State of Bihar, (1980) 1 SCC 98.

[7] Anita Kushwaha v Pushap Sudan, (2016) 8 SCC 509.

[8] Ministry of Law and Justice, reply in the Rajya Sabha, 13 August 2026, on Fast Track Special Courts functional as of 30 June 2026.

 

[9] Ministry of Law and Justice, FTSC case registration, disposal and pendency data for 2023, 2024 and 2025, furnished to Parliament in 2026.