Statistics
On June 2009, almost 30 million cases were pending in India’s
court. Out of this almost 3 million cases were pending in India’s
high courts. Around 50,000 cases were pending in Supreme Court.
Around 27 million cases are pending in subordinate courts of India.
According to Supreme Court almost 1500 high court judges and
23000 subordinate court judicial positions are needed to clear
the backlog of cases.
Judiciary
Indian judiciary has four problems.
First is Indian judicial system does not support access to judicial
system to common people. Common people cannot afford lawyers.
Second problem is delay in judicial procedures and long list
of pending cases.
Third problem is that judicial decision may be due to extraneous
reasons – corruption or incompetence.
Fourthly judiciary has become elitist and disconnected to poor
people.
There are three pronged approach needed to solve judicial problems.
The first is that we simplify procedures of court – this will
allow poor people access to court and speed up disposal of cases.
Increase the number of judges in court. The law commission has
recommended that number of judges be increased five fold from
present 15000.
There is need to improve method of selection of judiciary to
get good quality of judges. There should be a professional full
time body for selection of judges.
Corruption in judiciary can be checked by proper selection and
having a full time body for monitoring judges for accountability.
Corruption in judiciary may be due to lack of accountability.
The incentive for corruption in judiciary is huge. Furthermore
there is no disincentive for corruption due to lack of accountability.
Almost no judge has been booked in last 50 years, despite some
estimates that as many as 60% of judges could be corrupt.
While election to judiciary is not possible, selection must be
broad based.
Further judgements need not be long and can be made succinct.
Consumers of justice – people - must put pressure on government
to improve judiciary
Challenges
1. Neither government, nor judiciary is interested in improving
judiciary.
2. Government wants a dysfunctional judiciary.
3. Judiciary itself may be beneficiary of corruption and hence
not interested in improvement of corruption.
4. System of democracy has been corrupted.
5. There is no legal avenue to check corruption in judiciary,
including RTI.
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