Context-RecentlyTata Trusts in collaboration with Centre for Social Justice, Common Cause, and Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative released Indian justice report 2019.

• The report has been prepared based on publicly available data of different government entities on the four pillars of justice delivery — police, judiciary, prisons and legal aid.

Key findings

• Maharashtra has topped the list of 18 large-medium States in the overall first-ever ranking of Indian States on justice delivery, followed by Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Punjab and Haryana.
• In this category, Jharkhand, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are at the bottom, while among the list of seven smaller States, Goa leads the group.
• The report highlights the fact that even the best performing States scored less than 60% in their performance on capacity across the police, judiciary, prisons and legal aid.
• The findings establish beyond doubt very serious lacunae in our justice delivery system.
• The country has about 18,200 judges with about 23% sanctioned posts vacant, notes the report, adding that women are poorly represented in these pillars, constituting just 7% of the police.
• Prisons are over-occupied at 114%, where 68% are undertrials awaiting investigation, inquiry or trial. Regarding budgets, most States are not able to fully utilise the funds given to them by the Centre, while the increase in spending on the police, prisons and judiciary does not keep pace with the overall increase in State expenditure.
• It added that some pillars also remain affected by low budgets. For instance, India’s per capita spend on free legal aid is 75 paise per annum, the report said.
• The report looked at data indicators from the four pillars, covering themes like infrastructure, human resources, diversity (gender, Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe/Other Backward Class), budgets, workload and trends over the last five years.

Issues with indian justice system

• The pendency of cases –If we look at the figures, 2.84 crore cases are pending in the subordinate courts, the backlog clogging the High Courts and Supreme Court (SC) is 43 lakh and 57,987 cases, respectively. According to National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG), the five states which account for the highest pendency are Uttar Pradesh (61.58 lakh), Maharashtra (33.22 lakh), West Bengal (17.59 lakh), Bihar (16.58 lakh) and Gujarat (16.45 lakh). Harish V Nair, 3.3 crore backlog cases in courts, pendency figure at highest:

• There are not enough judges-There are not enough judges (only around 21,000). Current Judge to Population ratio is 10 to 1 million. The Law Commission report in 1987 recommends atleast 50 to 1 million. Population has increased by over 25 crore since 1987.

• There are not enough courts-Indian judiciary has insufficient resources. Both Center and States are not interested in increasing spending with respect to the judiciary.Budgetary allocations for the whole judiciary are a pathetic 0.1% to 0.4% of the whole budget.India needs more courts and more benches.Modernization and computerization have not reached all courts.

• Archaic Laws or Vague Drafting of Laws-The archaic laws that fill up the statute books, faulty or vague drafting of laws and their multiple interpretations by various courts are also reasons for prolonged litigation. Some of these laws date back to 1880s. Somebody wants to do something, he is shown a law drafted in the last century and told to stop doing it.