Judiciary Needs Reforms

Aug 4

At any public forum, it has become an established practice that the government flags the pendency of cases in courts and underlines the need to fix a target of disposing cases in the fastest possible way.

In reply, judiciary highlights two issues of judicial vacancy and judicial infrastructure for rising pendency of cases. There will be goody-goody talks, and sometimes acrimonious too, but the problem of pendency remains as such.

Recently there was an interesting comment by an important functionary of the judiciary that due to diminishing space for opposition in legislative bodies, laws are passed without much deliberations. Laws without deficiencies save the judiciary from the burden of litigations.

But he failed to mention that most of the existing laws are quite old ones, and why lower and upper courts and even different benches of the same court give different verdicts while all the judges have the same types of qualifications and experiences.

Undoubtedly addition of mediation, Lok Adalats, family courts etc has ensured fast disposal in certain pockets, but a lot of steps are needed to be taken in view of the fact that there are more than 47 million cases pending across all the courts in the country, including 6 million in the 25 high courts and 171 K in the country's highest court.

Irrespective of what top authorities say, the muffled voices of people are now heard questioning the conduct of judges and courts as under:

1. You all come at 10 o'clock, take lunch between 2 to 3 o'clock and then return home after 5 o'clock. Why can't you come at 8 in the morning and work till 8 in the night, as doctors, engineers, policemen, bankers, bureaucrats and people of the corporate world do?

2. All the courts are air-conditioned, then why colonial era's summer vacation in June and winter vacation in December even now? Why can't you work on Saturday and Sunday also to clear pendency? The working days of courts are less than 200 in a year, why can't it be increased to 300?

3. Why do you waste your precious time in trivial issues like Jalikattu, Dahi Handi and hundreds of useless and motivated PILs? You will review and then again review cases of the traitors of the country, even by opening court in the midnight, but not the cases of law abiding citizens pending in courts for decades and generations. There are 3.5 lakh undertrial prisoners languishing in various jails.

4. What happens to your dictum, 'let ten escape, but one innocent should not be punished', when thousands and thousands of people suffer, just waiting for your judgement? Will it not be better if one innocent is punished, but 99 criminals are not allowed to go scot free by misinterpreting laws?

Legislature makes laws, Executive carries out laws and Judiciary interprets laws if needed. As such judiciary becomes the last resort in many cases. Ideally all the three pillars of democracy must act within the respective domains, but not lose sight of the larger picture.

Lip service won't dispense any justice. There is an urgent need to overhaul the present system to ensure free, fast and fair justice to everyone.

--Kaushal Kishore

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