Judging workload

The exchange between President Abdul Kalam and Chief Justice Lahoti over how hard our judges work is a reminder of two things: the importance of judicial reforms, on the one hand, and the farcical quality of the debate about those reforms, on the other. In terms of number of cases disposed per judge, the Indian judiciary does not perform badly. But high courts could improve upon the 210 working day a year norm that is the practice. But any serious attempt to tackle the backlog will have to move beyond moralistic pieties of asking judges to work harder.

It is easy to be dispirited by statistics that point out that there are 3.2 million cases pending in high courts, and more than 20 million, in lower courts. But these staggering numbers are still tractable by supply side solutions. India8217;s judge strength is still only 2.7 per 100,000, against an international norm of 6.8. Scholars have calculated that simply doubling judge strength would clear the backlog in three to five years. Greater investment in IT infrastructure can radically alter the management of dockets as the success of the Supreme Court in reducing its backlog has shown. It is absolutely astonishing that a modern judiciary operates without giving judges basic support like well-trained law clerks. Rather than being intimidated by staggering figures, we need to address the problem more analytically. A single high court, Allahabad, accounts for a quarter of all pending high court cases. Just two high courts, Allahabad and Kolkata, account for 50 per cent of all pending civil cases listed for more than seven years. These sharp variations suggest that different courts face different problems.

Each needs to be addressed on its own terms, rather than be subject to facile recipes. Given that government litigation is around 60 per cent of dockets, the government needs to cut down on frivolous litigation. And, finally, the courts and the government have themselves weakened the force of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms. These supply side solutions are not a magic bullet to cure all the problems, but they are an important piece of the solution to the problem of backlogs. The fact is that judges have not been insistent on judicial reform. They expend more energy treading on executive prerogative in other areas, rather than hauling up the government for not supporting them adequately. The government has never been serious about judicial reform. It still regards institutions of contract enforcement as a marginal expenditure rather than an investment in improving both justice and efficiency. And, as a society, we have got so used to manipulating systems of justice that we no longer care about speedy justice itself.