Not long ago,even after 1991,there was a time when dispute resolution data were only available with a time-lag of around seven years. Data paucity led to strange figures floating around. One of these was the 324-year figure. If there were no new cases and present rates of disposal continued,it would take 324 years to clear the backlog. This was an all-India back-of-the-envelope kind of number,and simply untrue. However,324 years was catchy enough for this to be widely disseminated. Courtesy the Supreme Courts Court News,the time-lag is now less.
However,one should be pedantic first. The terms pendency,arrears,delay and backlog are used synonymously,though there is a difference. Pendency means total number of cases in courts and it is worth remembering court-based data dont capture cases clogged in quasi-judicial forums like tribunals. It is possible to argue high pendency indicates faith in the judicial system. Recently,the National Judicial Academy (NJA) put together some inter-state correlations. These show a neat positive correlation between institution rates and literacy. Another neat positive correlation exists between institution rates and population density. Per se,high pendency is a good rather than a bad. Arrears are excess of new cases over disposed cases. Arrears contribute to delays,old cases not disposed of.
Backlog is sometimes used in sense of pendency and sometimes in sense of delay. On June 30,pendency in Supreme Court was 52,592. On March 31,pendency in high courts was 4 million 3.2 million civil,0.8 million criminal. Of these,almost a million cases were stuck in the Allahabad HC and almost 500,000 in Madras. On March 31,26.8 million cases were stuck in district and subordinate courts,7.6 million civil and 19.1 million criminal. At this lower court level,there are 5.2 million cases in UP,4.1 million in Maharashtra,2.5 million in West Bengal,2.2 million in Gujarat.
Excluding quasi-judicial forums,we thus have overall pendency crossing 31 million. Thats an enormous figure. To dramatise,lets work out another somewhat inaccurate number. With two sides,31 million translates into 62 million. Roughly,one out of every four Indian households is thus stuck with a case in the court system. Thats horrendous. A gypsy curse states,May you have a law suit in which you are in the right, and it shouldnt be surprising that gypsies originated in India. Based on cross-country comparisons,extremely dubious for something like law reform,yet another back-of-the-envelope number can be mentioned. If we can fix the legal system,there will be an increment of 1 per cent to GDP growth.
Pendency is a stock,arrears are a flow. As is obvious,we should worry about arrears rather than pendency. What should be done has been repeated ad nauseam in the Rankin Committee (1924),High Courts Arrears Committees (1949,1972) several Law Commission reports,two Estimates Committees (1986,1990),and Satish Chandra Committee (1986). Broadly,there are supply-side solutions and demand-driven ones. On demand,one can use alternative dispute resolution,eliminate unnecessary cases under the Negotiable Instruments Act,Motor Accidents Claims or excise and get the government out of the system. Within civil cases,government litigation often crowds citizens out of the court system. One should mention yet another hoary number. Within civil litigation,60-65 per cent of cases involve the government,sometimes on both sides of the divide. A large chunk of this is in the form of appeals and 90-95 per cent of government appeals fail. That is,these are appeals that shouldnt have been made in the first place. There is automaticity about government appeals and this has to do with one particular section in Prevention of Corruption Act that makes all public servants risk-averse.
Those 60-65 per cent and 90-95 per cent figures are quoted universally as gospel truth. To the best of my knowledge,they are based on a study done by the National Law School in the Karnataka HC in the early 1990s. While the identified issues are correct,the numbers are thus not quite universal. Turning to supply,there are two (with spillovers) kinds of solutions enhance supply by increasing number of courts and judges (lok adalats,fast-track courts,family courts,nyaya panchayats,gram nyayalayas,peoples courts,womens courts are part of this) and improve productivity of existing infrastructure (mobile courts,shift systems,ICT-usage,reduced vacations,changes in procedural law,plea bargaining are part of this). That the NJA study found another neat inter-state correlation between load per judge and disposal rates. At a chief justices conference in 2004,a committee was constituted to get a fix on the recommended judge/case ratio and a figure of 500 to 600 was suggested for district and subordinate courts. Working with pendency figures,this translates into an additional 35,000 courts or so,depending on how one derives the number. There is also a difference between working strength and sanctioned strength. For instance,there are seven vacancies in the SC,234 in HCs and 2998 in lower courts.
Additional courts require additional judges,with large capital and recurrent expenditure. There are issues of who funds this (Centre versus states),financial autonomy for judiciary (which has limited acceptability until judiciary accepts improvement norms) and focus on certain types of cases (government litigation,petty cases,old cases) and specific courts (geographically targeted). These issues arent new and have been known. Whats new is that for the first time since 1991 (barring a brief Arun Jaitley stint),speed of dispute resolution is now on the reform agenda. One doesnt mean speeches by presidents and PMs. Of UPA-IIs unnecessarily hyped 100-day agendas,one that still remains is the Veerappa Moily one and on October 24-25 a national consultation was held on Strengthening the Judiciary towards Reducing Pendency and Delays. The first part of the title reflects a bias towards one variety of supply-side solutions; thats fine as long as the second part is addressed. As a fallout,we have had a vision statement with 15,700 new judges (some contractual),case disposal targets,three shifts in courts,reducing duration of cases from an average of 15 years to three,reduced government litigation,filling up vacancies,court management services by law students,video conferencing in jails,a national litigation policy and a national arrears grid.
Good ideas,though skepticism about implementation is understandable. However,a status report on action taken has been promised by January 2010. Perhaps one should therefore be a bit more charitable. What Rankin said in 1924 remained valid for several years. Hopefully,2010 might change that.
The writer is a Delhi-based economist
express@expressindia.com
