Context:  Recently, Bihar’s Bhojpur district court was in the news. It delivered a judgement on a land dispute case filed in 1914 which is 108 years ago, making it one of the oldest cases in the country.

Key findings about the pendency of cases in the lower judiciary

• According to some estimates, the district courts will take 324 years to dispose of all their pending cases at the current rate of disposal.
• According to the National Judicial Data Grid data in 2021, out of the total pending cases in Indian courts, around 87% are present in district and subordinate courts.  

Some of the detailed findings

• First, district-level pendency in criminal and civil matters are highly correlated. Courts that have delays in one type of matter (Criminal or Civil matters) are likely to have it in the other type (Civil or Criminal Matters) as well.
• Secondly, there are a few concentrated pockets of ‘high-pendency’ courts (see for instance Uttar Pradesh and Bihar).
• Third, there is no state-wide pattern of high pendency courts. Some districts in the same state do very well, while adjoining ones perform poorly. It implies that Pendency is a district-level problem, and not state or national level.

Key factors behind such judicial delays

Supply Side Factors

• India has 20 judges per million people, which is extremely low as compared to other countries like the UK (51) and the US (107).
• Judicial vacancies: Until two years ago, around 37% of judicial posts in high courts and 21% in subordinate courts were lying vacant.

Demand side factors

• Pendency rates will be closely related to filing rates, which may in turn depend on population, legal awareness, education, and income levels of the people.
• Note1: In accordance with some work done in Western countries, higher incomes increase litigation rates. For example, if more contracts are signed, more get broken.
• Note 2: The answer is not so clear in low-income regions. In accordance to studies in Kenya and India, the congestion in court cases is lower in higher-income regions. This could be due to the better capacity of richer-area courts, money-driven case acceleration, or well-off people do not break any law.

Road Ahead

• The PM and Chief Justice of India (CJI), in a joint conference of state chief ministers and chief justices of high courts (HC) emphasized the need for “speedy” justice.
• The judiciary can increase working days, adopt technology, and on creating specialized tribunals (for instance, the government’s recent proposal to set up special courts to close 3.3 million cheque-bounce cases).
• There is a need to decentralize both identification of policy problems and their solutions to Indian districts. For example, this random distribution of ‘high-pendency’ courts across the states require district-level interventions rather than state– or national-level policies interventions to address the problem of high pendency.

By: Shubham Tiwari