Surprising that more than 24 hours have passed, I am yet to get responses. It amply reflects the fact that our legal fraternity either in general either pay scant importance to rudimentary aspects of law OR pay callous attention to the basic tenets that govern the legal jurisprudence. That is why as reported in the Times of India Newspaper today. I extract as under:
Backlog will take 320 yrs to clear: Judge
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
Hyderabad: It will take the Indian judiciary 320 years to clear the backlog of cases. This staggering admission came on Saturday from someone who knows very well the way courts work — Justice VVS Rao of the Andhra Pradesh High Court.
That’s the time it’ll take to clear 31.28 million cases pending in the various courts, including the High Courts, he reckoned. “If one considers the total pendency of cases in the Indian judicial system, every judge in the country will have an average load of about 2,147 cases,” Justice Rao said in a speech at the AP Administrative Tribunal.
India has 14,576 judges as against the sanctioned strength of 17,641, including 630 HC judges. This works out to a ratio of 10.5 judges per million population, Justice Rao said. The Supreme Court in 2002 had suggested 50 judges per million population, he said.
If the norm of 50 judicial officers per million becomes a reality by 2030 when the country’s population would be 1.5 to 1.7 billion, the number of judges would go up to 1.25 lakh, dealing with 300 million cases. Increasing literacy rate results in more new cases: AP judge
Hyderabad: Justice VVS Rao of the Andhra Pradesh HC has come out with a startling assessment that it will take the courts in India 320 years to clear the backlog of cases. Addressing the AP Administrative Tribunal, he said a recent study indicated that the number of new cases had a direct relationship with increasing literacy rate and awareness.
Citing the example of Kerala, which had high literacy, Justice Rao said 28 new cases per 1,000 population per annum had been added, whereas in Bihar, which had a relatively low literacy rate, the figure stood at just three, he said.
Justice Rao summed up the Indian situation by quoting a para from the journal of International Law and Politics, which said: “The typical life span of a civil litigation in India presents a sad picture. Records of new filings are kept by hand and documents filed in courthouse are frequently misplaced or lost among other papers. Lawyers crowd the court room and wait for their cases to be called. Even when called, the judicial attention is frequently deferred by innumerable adjournments.”
It also said: “There is a little likelihood that the judge (who hears a case) will be the same one to issue a decision because the judges are transferred more quickly than the legal dispositions are made. Judges are so under paid and overworked that they often adjourn and delay the preparation of a case.”
Unquote:
It is NOT the issue of paucity of Judges, it is quality of Advocates as Law colleges have become an asylum for budding politicians who are not interested to learn the law subjects but just to scrape through the exams and get a law degree. That is why we see efficient law graduates do not take up full fledged law practice as they settle in any secured employment in Govt or PSUs or even change their career (like me) to become IT professionals. A stringent legislation is the need of the hour to ban law graduates who take up other jobs for the sake of employment. This is the only solution to reduce the backlog of cases that are gripping the judiciary.
