It has also recommended streamlining judicial appointments through an online system.
"The first step (towards judicial reforms) would be to establish a judicial performance index. Such an index could be established to help high courts and high court chief justices keep track of performance and process improvement at the district courts and subordinate levels for reducing delay," it said in a report released recently.
This would require fixing non-mandatory time frames for different types of cases as broad guidelines to benchmark when a case has been delayed, it said.
It suggested study of internationally developed measures such as 'global measures of court performance', created jointly by the Australasian Institute of Judicial Administration, the Federal Judicial Center (US), the National Center for State Courts (US) and the Subordinate Courts of Singapore.
Also Read
"The index can also include certain progress on process steps that have already been approved by high courts, like burden of day-to-day activity being removed from judges and given to administrative officials.
The NITI Aayog report has suggested shifting some workload out of the regular court system and introduction of an administrative cadre in the judicial system.
"To maintain judicial independence, the cadre should report in to the chief justice in each high court. Currently, judges also handle many administrative responsibilities, which reduce the time available to them for hearing cases and writing judgements," it said.
"Steps may also be taken for ensuring availability of online real time judicial statistics for determining the adequacy of judicial manpower and infrastructure to deal with work load of cases, which will enable priority appointment of judges at the lower judiciary levels keeping in mind a scientific approach to assessing the number of judges needed to tackle the pendency problem," it said.
Disclaimer: No Business Standard Journalist was involved in creation of this content