30 million and counting

The summer vacations end, highlighting huge backlog of cases

The great Indian judicial juggernaut is stirring after weeks of summer recess, with more than 30 million pending cases in its hold. The Supreme Court alone has 67,787 cases in arrears as on May 31. Out of them, 18,350 are up to a year old. The comforting thought, according to the court, is that the remaining make up only 49,437.

The latest statistics show that 61.4 per cent of the briefs are lying in the registry because the preliminary formalities have not been completed by the advocates. Out of the ready-to-hear matters, there are 45 cases that have to be decided by Constitution benches which should consist of at least five judges. Some of the issues, such as the right to property, have been on the files for three decades and require examination by a bench of 15 judges. Then there are 140 cases referred to larger benches - not necessarily Constitution benches - because the questions involved are so complex that benches of two or three judges have refrained from deciding them or have differed among themselves on the interpretation of the law.
 

The situation in the high courts is no better with 260 vacancies for judges to be filled up out of the total sanctioned strength of 895, till June last year. This is the latest official figure released by the Supreme Court, which has not updated it for a year. The district and subordinate courts in the country have a sanctioned strength of 17,866 judges, of which 3,752 are vacant.

The ideal judges-to-people ratio estimated by the law commission and Chief Justices is 50 judges for every 1 million. Currently, it is 10 judges. Therefore, there is no wonder that the average life of a suit is over 10 years. The human cost can be seen from the fact that 73 per cent of the inmates of the capital's famed Tihar Jail are "under trial". Many of them have been dumped there and forgotten because they cannot afford the cost of legal counsel and bail.

Despite vision documents and speeches in Delhi's seminar rooms, there has been little improvement in the judicial system. The Central and state governments still grant less than two per cent of the Budget to judiciary, which now includes some 50 tribunals and quasi-judicial outfits. Therefore, the infrastructure suffers severely. Several of them are accommodated in dilapidated buildings discarded by colonial rulers, such as the Competition Appellate Tribunal. The government does not provide staff and basic expenses. Lack of residence has prompted several nominees to these forums to decline the posts offered to them. The experiment in fast-track courts fizzled out when 1,500 were closed for lack of funds.

While the malign neglect of the system by the government persists, some reforms could come from the judiciary. The Supreme Court has time and again written about the vice of repeated adjournments, famously caricatured in films (Sunny Deol's 'Tariq pe tariq'). Long-winded arguments by lawyers are another evil that can be controlled by the judges. The Delhi High Court recently claimed that it had reduced the time taken for disposal of a case from 5.21 minutes to four minutes. It is by no means an achievement since every minute costs the High Court Rs 15,000.

A late start to the proceedings is evident to any visitor. Recently, a Supreme Court judge was peeved by a news report that her bench assembled about an hour late. Her defence was that the judges should not be considered "robots" and their time is not "dirt cheap". Even the Chief Justice is very often held up, perhaps by administrative duties.

The Supreme Court has chastised high courts very often for not delivering judgments reasonably fast. Some high courts have taken the criticism seriously and now indicate on top of their judgments, the date when the arguments closed and when the decision was pronounced. The gap is now only a few days or weeks. But the Supreme Court does no such thing. It is generally accepted that the judges write their judgments only a few weeks before their retirement date. The US Supreme Court judgment on gay rights last week recalled to one's mind that a similar issue is waiting for the judgment of the Indian Supreme Court which had reserved it more than a year ago.

Selection of judges to the higher judiciary is still a contentious issue and Bills to make the selection transparent and efficient have not left the drafting table. The present system is opaque since the selection is done by five senior-most judges, called the "collegium". The government has little say in this selection. This leads to unsavoury comments by the legal professionals and politicians.

Successive Chief Justices have failed to improve the system significantly. For one thing, their terms happen to be too short to make any difference to the conservative institution. On July 19, Chief Justice Altamas Kabir will retire after a 10-month reign and P Sathasivam will take over. In a term less than that of his predecessor, whether or not the Chief Justice of India-designate will be able to take up the gauntlet is the moot question.