(Excerpts from the book rebooting India, more such extracts to follow)
At his best, man is the noblest
of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst
-Aristotle
At risk of stating the extremely
obvious, the Indian judicial system is in trouble. By any measure you choose,
our judiciary is a woeful under performer, whether it is in the number of judges
and courts available to us, or the speedy disposal of cases placed before them.
We have only ten to fifteen judges per million people, and our
judge-to-population ratio is among the lowest in the world. As of 2014, the
total number of pending cases across India was a staggering 30 million. If the
judiciary at its existing strength were to roll up its sleeves and tackle the
herculean task of resolving all the cases pending across the country, Andhra
Pradesh High Court Judge V.V. Rao estimated it would take them 320 years to
clear the backlog. A few years ago, Delhi Chief justice A. P Shah admitted that
the Delhi High Court was lagging behind by 466 years; in an attempt to clear up
its caseload, the court decreased the average time spent hearing a case to a
little over five minutes.
Even five minutes in court would be a welcome relief for the 3,00,000 inmates of India's prisons who languish in custody while waiting for their case to be heard. Their numbers are growing steadily, and many of them are either illiterate or poorly educated. If their case is to be heard by a higher court- as in the case of an appeal-they're in for another endless wait, since it takes an estimated fifteen to twenty years for a case to wend its way from the lower courts all the way up to the supreme court. No wonder, legal cases in India often become family heirlooms, with the children and grand children of the litigants faithfully continuing to fight for their family's cause long after the original complainants are dead and gone.
