Kulai Ibrahim @ Ibrahim v. State (2014)

In practice the dispute about a child's age is usually a dispute about whether to order an ossification test. Prosecutors ask for one whenever the documents are inconvenient; defence claims rest on documents that the prosecution says are got up. A student needs to know whether medical assessment is an alternative route to age or a fallback.

Kulai Ibrahim settles that it is a fallback, and states the only two conditions on which it opens.

The question concerned the determination of the age of a person claiming juvenility, and in particular when it is necessary to obtain a medical assessment of age.

The Court held that it is necessary to obtain a medical assessment only in cases where the documents specified at the head of the age-determination hierarchy are unavailable, or where they are found to be fabricated or manipulated.

The hierarchy is exclusionary by design. Documentary proof of age is contemporaneous and specific; medical assessment is inferential and yields a range rather than a date. A rule that allowed a court to go to the medical evidence while good documents existed would let the less reliable evidence displace the more reliable one, and would in effect give either side a way of reopening age whenever the documents did not suit.

Hence the two gateways, and only two: absence, and proved falsity. Note what does not open the gateway — a mere assertion that the certificate is wrong, or the appearance of the person before the court.

Use it in any problem where an ossification test is sought, or where the court is invited to disbelieve a school record. It is the natural companion to Shah Nawaz v. State of U.P., which establishes what counts as a document, and it completes the sequence: documents first, medical assessment only on one of the two conditions.

Add the two propositions the course carries alongside it: that where age is determined on medical material the benefit of the lower margin is given to the person claiming juvenility, as in Darga Ram v. State of Rajasthan, (2015) 2 SCC 775; and that the determination is to be completed quickly, the Act of 2015 requiring the test ordered by the Committee or the Board to be completed within fifteen days of the order.

It does not decide the weight to be given to a medical report once obtained, and it does not decide any question about the merits of the offence alleged.

The decision was given under the earlier Act; the hierarchy it applies is now in s. 94(2) of the Act of 2015, in substantially the same order.