INDIA CRYING FOR QUICK JUSTICE

Courts in India will take 320 years to clear backlog cases . This estimate comes from Justice Rao, an esteemed judge of Andhra High Court. This only means that a majority of criminals and accused will leave this world after enjoying their lives without any getting any punishment for their misdeeds. While every sane Indian is convinced about the need to big additions in the judiciary manpower for quick and timely disposal of all cases be it criminal, economic offences, civil disputes or heinous crimes like gang rapes, the rulers and the polity want the status quo to continue.

The Indian Judiciary consists of the Supreme Court with 26 judges (proposed to be increased to 30), 21 High Courts with a sanctioned strength of 725 justices (proposed to be increased by another 100 to 150 judges) and 14,477 subordinate courts / judges.  For a variety of reasons the working strength at all the three levels is short by 15 to 30 per cent.  Compared to India’s population this is admittedly an inadequate number.  According to the Law Commission (120th Report, 1987) the number of judges per million population in India was 10.5 which may have gone up to between 13  or 14 per million by now.    In the All India Judges’ Association Case [(2002) 4 SCC 247], the Supreme Court directed the Central and State governments to consider increasing the number of judges five-fold in a phased manner over a five year period in order to achieve the judge to population ratio as 50 per million.  The proposal was not acted upon, inter alia, due to financial constraints. 

It is not a coincidence that well Over 300 posts of judges in high courts are lying vacant. With a large no of legislators involved in various types of offences (who will never desire to have quick disposal of their cases), there is no urgency even to fill up these vacancies. Increasing the judiciary cadres five folds is something that will remain a far off dream because of vested interests of about 40% of the legislators involved in various cases. Even the  so called saints in the Indian polity will only raise some hue and cry  without making any serious attempt to do something that will improve the law and order situation in the country and can be a big step towards corruption mitigation. After all they are not fools who will initiate a measure that can jeopardize their government and rule because nobody wants to lose the votes that support them for their existence.