Legal Compliance in Child-Centric NGOs: Enabling the Organisation to Protect the Child

Abstract

Child‑centric non‑governmental organisations (NGOs) in India operate at the intersection of healthcare, welfare, and child‑protection law, yet their legal‑compliance infrastructure remains fragmented and under‑enforced (Srivastava “An Overview”). Existing scholarship on child rights highlights both the robustness of India’s statutory framework, stretching from the Constitution and the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 (JJ Act) to the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (POCSO), and the persistent gap between legal guarantees and on‑the‑ground implementation (BetterCare Network, “Institutional Mechanisms”). This paper argues that, for child‑focused NGOs, legal compliance must be reframed from a bureaucratic burden into a preventive safeguarding architecture that structurally reduces the risk of institutional harm to children (Roy 438). Using a mixed doctrinal and case‑based methodology, it analyses statutes, rules, and policy instruments alongside practice‑informed insights from CanKids, a child‑centric NGO, to propose a practical compliance framework that links child‑rights obligations, organisational governance, and funding‑linked due diligence (Srivastava “An Overview”; Manoharan 117–30). The paper’s central contribution is the normative claim that rigorous, child‑centred compliance enhances both programmatic integrity and long‑term organisational sustainability, thereby aligning legal duty with mission‑driven work (Bal Raksha Bharat, “Key Factors”).