Simple traffic violations and cases like littering involving police fines account for over a third of all cases in India’s lower courts, the Law Commission has found in a new report on judicial delay. The Law Commission, headed by Justice A.P. Shah submitted its 245th Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad in July. The report on ‘Arrears and Backlog: Creating Additional Judicial (wo)manpower” attempts to arrive at a scientific estimate of real pendency in lower courts across the country and an estimate of the additional number of judges that would be needed to clear the backlog and dispose of future cases within Lower court data was split into two levels – the Subordinate Judicial Service and the Higher Judicial Service which looks at more serious cases. At the end of 2012, 1 crore cases in Subordinate Judicial Services courts and 20 lakh cases were pending in Higher Judicial Services courts across the country.
While pendency was on the decline in the former between 2002 and 2012, it rose in the latter, the report notes. The pendency clearance rates – the amount of time it would take the court to clear all pending cases if it took no new cases – was on the decline in both, and down to 1.5 and 1.25 years respectively for the Higher Judicial Service and the Subordinate Judicial Service by the end of 2012. In the last three years, 38.7% of institutions and 37.4% of all pending cases before subordinate courts were traffic and police challans. Cheque-bouncing cases accounted for an additional 6.5% and 7.8% cases account for institution and pendency. For such cases, the Commission recommended “automation of the system through the ability to pay fines online or at a designated counter in the Court complex, can significantly free up valuable Court time. For the remainder, the Commission considers that the creation of separate Special Traffic Courts...may significantly reduce the burden on regular Courts” and suggested that recent law graduates could staff these courts.
To clear the backlog in lower courts as a whole as well as ensure that no backlog was created in the future, the Commission recommended that the strength of the lower judiciary needed to be significantly improved. The number of additional judges needed to clear backlog in three years ranged from nearly 2148 in Bihar to 0 in Delhi.
“Without adequate infrastructure or support staff, an increase in judge strength will not be effective as a delay reduction strategy, the Commission warned. It also recommended that the age of retirement of subordinate judges be raised to 62 and another 1000 judges be recruited to High Courts to deal with the increased workload that would come their way.
The Commission noted that it was severely hamstrung by the poor state of data-keeping among various courts, the widely varying definitions used by different states,
report to Law and the errors and inaccuracies it observed in some courts’ data. Since many states like West Bengal and Kerala count certain types of proceedings in each case as separate ‘institutions’, the actual number of cases instituted, disposed of and pending in the country is actually likely to be significantly smaller than is currently believed, the report noted.
"Apart from various findings on adequate judge strength for the subordinate judiciary, the report highlights the abysmal state of data available about the functioning of the judiciary, which makes evidence-based judicial reform efforts an extremely difficult task. Therefore, any numbers that get thrown around about the problem of 'pendency' are likely to be grossly off the mark,” Aparna Chandra, Assistant Professor at NLU, Delhi and a member of the group of experts constituted by the law commission to aid with drafting the report, told The Hindu. “The report also advocates shifting from a focus on "pendency" of cases as the parameter to evaluate the performance of the judicial system, to focusing on those pending cases which are delayed,” she added.
