India doesn't have a justice system. It has a price list

On February 3, 2026, Sahil Dhaneshra perished on a road in Dwarka, Delhi, not because the road was broken, not because of fog or fate, but because a 17-year-old without a license was driving a Scorpio SUV and shooting speed clips for Instagram. Sahil, a 23-year-old fresh BBA graduate, supported his mother by working two jobs. He had applied to universities abroad, and just ten days after his death, his mother, Inna Makan, who had raised him alone after losing her husband, was left to sign for an acceptance letter from the University of Manchester that arrived too late for him to read. Far from being merely a road accident, the case has become a stark illustration of how India’s justice system too often bends with alarming predictability in favour of those powerful enough to influence it.

The Accident That Wasn't Just an Accident

Even stripped of emotion, the facts remain damning, beginning with the reality that the teenager behind the wheel, Akshatra Singh, did not possess a valid driver’s license. The SUV had 13 previous over-speeding challan tickets that had been paid, forgotten, and then followed by additional speeding. His sister sat next to him on the day of the collision and recorded the entire incident for social media. Sahil's mother claims that even after the initial collision, the driver never used the brakes.

The postmortem report stated that the 23-year-old died from significant bleeding and documented a fractured skull on the left side of his head, along with a blood clot beneath the scalp. The study further noted significant internal damage, including brain oedema and lung injury, with the injuries determined to be consistent with the circumstances of the road accident. The post-mortem examination confirmed that the man died from haemorrhagic shock caused by severe cranio-cerebral trauma with extensive bleeding, having suffered multiple fatal injuries to the head and chest, along with lesions to the right upper limb and damage to vital organs. Additionally, the pathology report revealed extensive internal injuries, including fractures in the left fourth, fifth, and sixth ribs with nearly 100 millilitres of blood collected in both pleural cavities indicating severe chest trauma, alongside a shattered left temporo-parietal skull bone, a sub-scalp hematoma in the left parietal region, haemorrhagic contusions, widespread cerebral edema, a massive subdural hematoma in the left parieto-temporal area of the brain, and clotted blood present inside the oral cavity.

The Dwarka South police station was in charge of the deadly occurrence, which happened on February 3 at 11:57 a.m. close to Lal Bahadur Shastri College. When police arrived at the scene, they found Sahil’s motorcycle, a Scorpio, and a parked Swift Dzire taxi mangled in a pile-up that preliminary findings suggest began when the Scorpio struck the motorcycle from the opposite direction before crashing into the taxi, leaving its driver, Ajit Singh, injured and later treated at IGI Hospital.

The Father's Alibi and the Law's Fine Print

Akshatra’s father, who runs a commercial transportation company, stated after the collision that he had been out of town and was unaware that his son had taken the car, and he issued a public apology and promised full cooperation with the courts. Section 199A of the Motor Vehicles Act, which was created expressly to hold guardians responsible when children cause accidents with their vehicles, was used by the police to book him. Even though the law seems to provide a significant deterrent on paper, its inability to produce consistent prosecution in practice shows that the discrepancy between legal promise and legal reality reflects how the system functions rather than a weakness in it.

The Juvenile Justice Carousel

After being placed in an observation home following the incident, Akshatra was granted temporary bail on February 10 to appear for his Class 10 board examinations before securing regular bail in March, a decision later challenged by Sahil’s mother on April 17, 2026. Her appeal was denied by the Dwarka court, which determined that the goals of justice would not be compromised by the accused's release. The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, which places a higher priority on rehabilitation than punishment for offenders under the age of 18, is the source of this textbook juvenile justice phrase. While the principle behind the law, prioritising rehabilitation over incarceration for young offenders, remains both defensible and widely practised across functional democracies, that ideal begins to lose moral credibility when accountability itself appears fragile, with bail granted within weeks, chargesheets against guardians stalling, and social media reels of the incident continuing to circulate publicly, turning the language of “rehabilitation” into something that feels less like justice and more like a euphemism.

This Is Not a New Story

Although the Sahil Dhaneshra case is horrible, it is not unique. Rich or well-connected families in India have a history of protecting young males from the repercussions of driving carelessly. The most often cited example is the Pune Porsche case, in which two young software engineers, Ashwini Koshta and Anish Awadhiya, were going home on a motorcycle when a 17-year-old from a well-known real estate family drove a Porsche through Pune's Kalyani Nagar neighbourhood at a high speed. The juvenile board reportedly ordered the kid to write an essay on road safety and spend time with a traffic police constable as conditions of bail before releasing him within 15 hours.

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways reports that 1,68,491 people were killed in 4,61,312 traffic accidents in India in 2022. One of the main causes is always speeding. Because juvenile trials are sealed and data are not made public, it is challenging to objectively assess conviction rates for traffic accident fatalities involving minor drivers. Conveniently, this opacity, which is meant to safeguard children, also makes it impossible to gauge accountability. In 2022, there were 884 incidents of juvenile offenders in traffic accidents, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau.

What Inna Makan Represents

The way this ordeal has unfolded has been especially devastating for Sahil’s mother, a woman of limited means who, after losing her husband when Sahil was barely old enough to walk, spent the next 23 years building her entire world around her only child while simultaneously navigating a legal system in which she held no institutional influence, repeatedly challenging bail orders only to watch them be denied. In the meantime, the accused's family has access to resources, legal counsel, and the subtle benefit of knowing how courts operate, what procedural arguments to offer, and how to extend deadlines until the opposing side becomes weary.

Although this asymmetry is hardly unique to India and exists across most legal systems worldwide, it appears particularly stark, visible, and routinely overlooked in the Indian context, where the 2022 India Justice Report published in 2023 found most states performing poorly on access to justice indicators such as pendency rates, judge-to-population ratios, and legal aid reach, with the country averaging only about 21 judges per million people, among the lowest ratios seen in comparable democracies.

The Price List

Describing India’s legal system as “broken” suggests that it once functioned as promised and later failed, when for many Indians across social and economic backgrounds, that promise was never fully realised to begin with. What exists instead is a deeply layered structure in which access to justice is unevenly distributed between those who can afford prolonged legal battles and those who cannot, between individuals whose cases move swiftly through the system and others trapped in years of delay, and between those for whom bail is almost automatic and those for whom freedom remains a distant possibility.

The Sahil Dhaneshra case stands as a stark illustration of that tiered system, where a 17-year-old with a history of over-speeding, no licence, and a habit of filming reels while driving could kill a man and secure regular bail within months, while his father faces unresolved charges for allegedly enabling years of reckless behaviour, the victim’s mother loses her challenge against the bail, an acceptance letter from Manchester likely waits untouched in a drawer, and the court maintains that “the ends of justice” would not be defeated, a conclusion that raises the unavoidable question of what those ends of justice look like to Inna Makan.

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