A fifth of posts in high courts lying vacant

More than a fifth of the positions at various high courts in the country are lying vacant even as cases pending for more than five years have piled up to a mammoth 1,342,000.

While the statistics are grim, progress is unlikely soon. "The Centre has requested all state governments to take necessary action to increase the number of judges," Law and Justice Minister HR Bhardwaj told Parliament in a written reply today.

Last week, Minister of State for Law and Justice K Venkatapathy had informed Parliament that the chief justices of the high courts had to initiate the appointment process and the Centre had been requesting the chief justices to do so from time to time.

In September, the conference of the chief ministers and chief justices of the high courts had deliberated on reducing the arrears of cases. Out of the total pendency for more than five years, 11.37 lakh are civil cases.

While the conference had resolved to extend the fast-track court scheme for another five years and establish fast-track courts, there was no resolution on how to fill up the large number of vacancies at the high courts.

The conference had decided to work out the Judge-case ratio instead of Judge-population ratio for effective caseload management.

The filling up of positions at sub ordinate courts has also hit a road block "The Centre's plan for increasing judges in the union territories based on workload is sub judice at the apex court," said Bhardwaj in his reply.

The Supreme court in 2002 had directed the government to increase the judge strength from 10.5-13 per lakh people to 50 judges per 10 lakh people within 5 years.

"The present combined district court and high court judge strength in India is 13 per million population", said Bhardwaj. In US this number was 107, in UK it stood at 50.9 and Australia had 41.6 judges per million," the minister quoted a 1987 report.

While the issue of vacancies looms large the government had last year decided to increase the strength of Judges at various high courts from 655 to 749. The number of High court judges as on November 2004 stands much lower at 525.

To another query on whether the government has suggested to cut down the long vacations and increase the number of working days to improve the productivity, Bhardwaj quoted the Prime Minister who had told the recent conference of Chief Justices and Chief Ministers, "It is, I believe, up to the judiciary to do some soul searching and ensure how best this can be done."