Delhi lives in two cities, one glitters, the other festers. When conversations around childhood takes place in drawing rooms and academic circles, they are almost always about the progeny of privilege.
We speak endlessly of adolescent depression, screen addiction, and performance anxiety, but the case studies almost always revolve around children who have parents, resources, and institutional support.
The other city, home to millions of the poor, tells a far more disturbing tale. Here childhood is short, harsh, and often brutal. A recent newspaper report lays bare this reality with chilling clarity. Between January and August this year alone, minors in Delhi were allegedly involved in 101 murders, 92 rapes, 157 robberies and dacoities, 161 attempted murders, 139 cases of causing hurt, and 460 cases of burglary and theft. Over 190 juveniles were apprehended for murder, 288 for attempted murder, 268 for robbery and dacoity, 101 for rape, and 220 for causing hurt. The largest number, 575 were held for burglaries and thefts.
And this isn’t an aberration. In just the first week of this month, 13 minors were accused of four heinous crimes, sexual assault of a boy in a government school in Rohini, two murders in Shakarpur and Wazirabad, and the killing of a cabbie near Hazrat Nizamuddin. The city is not merely witnessing delinquency, it is seeing children descend into cycles of violence with alarming regularity.
Ask the so-called experts why this is happening and they will provide explanations that, while not incorrect, are painfully incomplete. Juveniles are drawn into burglaries and thefts under the influence of drugs, they say. Gangs lure impoverished minors with intoxicants and then deploy them for criminal activities.
Growing addiction to social media adds another layer, with some minors using online platforms to flaunt pistols and knives. And, of course, the standard refrain—ineffective parenting.
Why are these children growing up like orphans despite having living parents? Why does Delhi face such profound social and economic depravity that entire childhoods are collapsing?
To answer these questions, one must look beyond the behaviour of individuals and examine the structural violence built into the city’s design. In Delhi’s working-class families, parenting is a luxury. Most parents of the urban poor work in informal, unstable jobs, like domestic work, street vending, etc.
Their wages pitiful and job security non-existent. For many, a 12- to 14-hour workday is routine. When the city demands so much for survival, what time remains for nurturing or emotional presence? A child may have parents who love them deeply but are simply unavailable. In effect, the child grows up functionally orphaned.
When a society extracts labour but withholds support, broken families are not a coincidence; they are an outcome. Large swathes of Delhi’s poor live in resettlement colonies and slums with little access to safe recreation, community spaces, or mentoring. In such vacuum, gangs replace community. Violence becomes a language learned early.
Government schools remain overstretched and under-resourced. Many first-generation learners drop out early because schools do not have the ability to support children dealing with poverty, trauma, domestic abuse, or hunger. A child who leaves school becomes vulnerable to exploitation. The failure is of schooling and social support systems.
Ironically, while the mental health of privileged children occupies public attention, the emotional turmoil of poor children goes unnoticed. Exposure to violence, addiction, instability, and neglect creates psychological wounds that morph into aggression or despair. Without counselling, intervention, or safe adults, these children internalise trauma until it erupts outward as crime. The child is blamed, though the city fails him.
Delhi’s poor are trapped in inter-generational poverty, and the children bear the burden. When young boys see no legitimate path to dignity or economic mobility, the gang offers a quick alternative. Crime becomes not a moral choice but an economic strategy, a way to feel powerful in a city designed to make them feel invisible.
Delhi cannot find its way out of this crisis by merely arresting and jailing these children. The city must invest in its forgotten children before it fears them. It’s the city’s social and economic environment makes a child a criminal and the city that must take responsibility for unmaking them.
Sidharth Mishra
Author and president,
Centre for Reforms,
Development & Justice