Justice Deepak Gupta, former Supreme Court Judge speaks to The Probe’s Bhaswati Sengupta on pendency of cases in Indian courts.
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Nearly five crore cases are pending across courts in India. In the Supreme Court alone, over 70,000 cases have been pending, and there is a backlog of about 60 lakh cases in the country’s high courts. Justice Deepak Gupta says that India lacks adequate judges and courts. “We have a very large population. We have more than 130 crore people, and there are bound to be more cases. Our judge-to-population ratio is one of the lowest in the civilised world. Even small countries like Egypt have the same number of judges as we have. The other thing is that the state itself is the biggest litigant in the country. A lot of criminal cases are filed which have no reason to be filed. A lot of civil cases are defended by the state, which the state should not be defending. Above all, our country has an adjournment culture. Our court procedures are outdated, and we don’t use technology as much as we should.”
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Sudhanshu S Pandey, a Supreme Court lawyer, says that several people in India have been languishing in jails in different parts of the country not for their crimes but because the courts could not find time to hear their pleas. He talks about one such heart-wrenching case.
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India Justice Report 2022 recently revealed that the problems related to judges vacancies in India was an endemic. As of December 2022, the high courts in India were functioning with only 778 judges against a sanctioned strength of 1108 judges. “If you take the vacancies in Delhi High Court, you will find that there will always be 20 vacancies for judges at any given point of time, but it will not be filled at all,” asserts Pandey.
According to the government’s figures, India has approximately 21 judges per million population. The government gave out the details on the basis of the sanctioned strength of the judiciary and census figures of 2011. “We have one of the lowest per capita ratios of judges in the world. The government is not interested in increasing the number of judges and their infrastructure. We lack an extremely efficient judiciary. The lawyers are also unwilling to cooperate in the speedy disposal of cases and are somewhat responsible for delays in hearing cases. These delays have started affecting the law and order situation in the country. It is time all stakeholders sit together and work to resolve the issue of pendency of cases,” says Dushyant Dave, senior advocate of the Supreme Court.
Justice Gupta says that before Covid, the pendency in the courts of India was about three crores, but it rose to a whopping five crores as after Covid, cases did not get disposed of as they used to in the past. Gupta fears that if the pendency of cases is not addressed immediately, the entire judicial system will collapse, and people will start using alternative methods of settling disputes that are unconstitutional.
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“There are alternative methods which I would welcome. Those are arbitration, conciliation, mediation and settlements outside the courts. But I am more worried that some other alternative methods would be used by people that are illegal. Like for instance, a landlord hiring goons to beat up the tenant. A company getting goons to recover their dues from a person. They will resort to alternate tactics if they feel that the courts can’t give them relief. That is why we need a speedy case disposal system,” notes Justice Gupta.