Pile-ups at High Courts

May 05, 2015 01:17 am | Updated November 16, 2021 05:07 pm IST

That India’s courts are clogged with long-pending cases is well-known, but the texture of the problem is something we’ve known little about so far. A new database of court data lays out some of the contours of the issue: over 40 lakh >cases are pending in India’s High Courts , and a tenth in courts for which data are available have been pending for over ten years. The oldest case languishing in the few courts for which enough data are available is just a decade younger than India itself. A quarter of the cases for which information is available are pending at the admission stage itself. An earlier Law Commission report found that the situation was far more dire in the lower courts — at the end of 2012, some one crore cases were pending in Subordinate Judicial Services courts and 20 lakh cases in Higher Judicial Services courts across 12 High Court jurisdictions in the country. A certain fatality has marked India’s efforts to deal with pendency thus far. We are a big country, we are a litigious people, we have chronic administrative undercapacity and a perennially under-resourced judiciary, we are told. So enormous has the problem begun to appear in the public mind that it has seemed impossible to fix. This is not necessarily true.

For one, the real extent of judicial pendency in India is nearly impossible to estimate on account of an utter lack of standardisation in data classification and management systems; virtually every State is a law unto itself, collecting and classifying case data as it chooses, making it impossible to compare with the neighbouring State. This is not a purely technical concern; it has severely hamstrung India’s efforts to understand the nature of not just judicial delay, but the judicial process itself. There is no good reason for this state of affairs to continue; the technology to resolve this is now easily and cheaply available. In addition, there are simple administrative fixes that have been suggested by reform-minded judges. As Chief Justice of the Madras High Court, Justice A.P. Shah had instituted evening courts to look after traffic and police challans, which account for over a third of all cases pending in the lower courts. Such cases need to be removed from the regular court system altogether. Plea bargaining is another judicial reform step that has not yet picked up in India. Finally, the grossly inadequate judge strength must increase; even if not the doubling of judge strength as promised in the past by the Ministry of Law and Justice, a significant leap is unavoidable. For justice and the rule of law to seem meaningful to the people, the government must back its assurances with resources.

Battling Backlog

Forty lakh cases are pending before 10 High Courts

Total pending cases
4,54,616
Less than two years
1,63,982
2 to 5 years
61,313
5 to 10 years
30,573
over 10 years
14,781
Hyderabad
5,741
Gujarat
4,168
Patna
2,122
Jharkhand
1,436
Karnataka
1,312
High CourtsCalcuttaDelhiGujaratJharkand
2542,6454,9641,330
22,87748,73147,71728,112
HyderabadMadrasOrissaPatnaKerala
3,4298914183,9624,565
67,45917,61410,40746,60052,934

Cases disposed of between Jan-Mar 2015

Pending cases

Top News Today

Sign in to unlock member-only benefits!
  • Access 10 free stories every month
  • Save stories to read later
  • Access to comment on every story
  • Sign-up/manage your newsletter subscriptions with a single click
  • Get notified by email for early access to discounts & offers on our products
Sign in

Comments

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.

We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.