His only motive, he told the judge, was to buy food for his mother and brother

The 16-year-old boy told the judge why he had stolen the purse. He couldn’t, the teenager said, watch his mother and younger brother waste away in hunger.

It was Friday, April 17, three days into the extended pandemic lockdown.

As the courtroom in Bihar’s Nalanda waited, the judge pronounced the verdict: the boy was free to go.

Chief judicial magistrate Manvendra Mishra also ordered that the boy be bought food grains, vegetables and clothes. The judge requested the court staff to buy the items with his own money.

Eyewitnesses would later recall that there was many a moist eye in the courtroom as the juvenile justice proceedings unfolded.

Later in the day, police dropped the boy at his home in a village that falls in the home district of chief minister Nitish Kumar.

“They have nothing apart from a thatched room with crumbling brick walls. No bed, no utensils, no stove, no household goods. We shuddered at the thought of how they have been living,” Islampur circle officer Nalin Vinod Pushpraj said after local officials visited the boy’s home on Saturday.

It was sometime last month that the boy had gone to a local market and stolen a woman’s purse. His only motive, he told the judge, was to buy food for his mother and brother.

Footage from CCTV cameras helped the police identify and catch the boy.

His father had died a few years ago, the boy said, and his mother had become mentally disturbed. He himself had fractured a leg, which had not healed properly because of the lack of medical care, leaving him with a limp.

As if this wasn’t enough, he lost vision in his right eye after being hit by a pebble. The eye could not be saved because of lack of medical care.

Left with his mother and a younger brother, now 12, the boy had taken up the responsibility for his family, doing odd jobs in his village and in the Islampur market to make ends meet. They managed somehow — till the pandemic struck, followed by the lockdown.

“Suddenly I was not getting any work. People in the village and the market shooed me away saying I would bring disease to them. My mother and younger brother would beg for food whenever I didn’t get work. Now everybody was shooing them away too. We were hungry and I had no option left,” the boy said.

Judge Mishra directed the local administration to ensure that the family did not go hungry in future and also received the benefits of all the welfare schemes the family was eligible for.

Acting on the judge’s order, local officials visited the boy’s home on Saturday. “The family cooks food over the leftover fire on the stoves of other households or in terracotta pots over fires lit outside on better days,” circle officer Pushpraj said.

“The family has no ration card or Aadhaar card. We have provided them with food grains and other eatables. We will provide them with a ration card and other facilities soon,” the officer said.