After spending five days in a juvenile home in Motihari, East Champaran district, in an illegal firearm case, a 16-year-old boy was granted leave to visit his 'ailing brother' in Patna on August 27. A day later, he shot and killed one of Bihar's top gangsters, Santosh Jha, while the latter was being escorted back to jail from a court in Sitamarhi. And he would have gotten away with it but for the arrest of an accomplice who spilled the beans: the juvenile had been hired to kill Jha. The young hitman is still at large, and police officers say this is an example of a new trend where criminal gangs hire juveniles lodged in observation homes to commit murders. Last year, in May 2017, two young inmates of the same observation home had sneaked out and travelled 45 km to gun down Bablu Dubey, another gangster on trial at the Bettiah courts.

Having returned to the remand home, they were later arrested after being identified from the CCTV footage. Ironically, it was the murdered Jha who first started recruiting young killers to his gang. The allure for the youngsters is big money and also the gangsters' promise that maximum punishment under the Juvenile Justice Act was three years in a remand or observation home. It is often too late when they learn that the JJ Act was amended in December 2015 to allow 16- to 18-year-olds to be tried as adults for heinous crimes such as rape and murder. A senior police officer says criminals have even been known to use social media portals like Facebook to lure impressionable teens to the "gangland lifestyle of glamour and money". The youngsters who succumb are known to be even more brutal than older criminals. Meanwhile, crimes by juveniles continue.

On September 19, five inmates at the observation home in Purnia killed their house warden and a fellow inmate. Investigations revealed that a former warden who had a grudge against his successor had hired the boys. Coming not long after the horrific Muzaffarnagar childcare home incident, the killings have once again put Bihar's much maligned social welfare department under the scanner.