[This article was originally written for a legal essay competition and was awarded the 3rd prize]
Justice
Shri V.R. Krishna Iyer once said, “Man lives in the short run, but
litigation lives in the long run”, to which former President of
India Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam said, “How true! I would say that it
literally crawls in the long run.”
The
Constitution of India gives a lot of importance to the concept of
justice. The preamble states that Justice- social, economic and
political shall be secured to all citizens of India. Furthermore the
right to speedy and affordable justice has now been classified as a
fundamental right included under Article 21. Also Article 39-A, one
of the Directive Principles states “The
State shall secure that the operation of the legal system promotes
justice, on a basis of equal opportunity, and shall, in particular,
provide free legal aid, by suitable legislation or schemes or in any
other way, to ensure that opportunities for
securing
justice are not denied to any citizen by reason of economic or other
disabilities.”
In
spite
of such importance given to the concept of justice in the mother of
all laws in India, the present scenario shows a blatant disregard
towards this concept and a whopping number of cases are pending at
all levels of the judiciary.
According
to the Court
News April-June 2010, there
are about 33,362 matters (excluding connected matters) pending in the
Supreme Court as on 31-8-2010. The 21 High Courts have a total of
4,108,555
cases- civil and criminal- pending as on 31-3-2010. And pendency of
civil and criminal cases at the end of 31-3-2010 in the District and
Subordinate Courts in all States of India is a gigantic number of
27,374,908.
Another
glaring instance of ‘justice delayed is justice denied’ is the
recent judgment for the Bhopal Gas leak case, where more than 25
years was taken by the lowest court for its decision and
the 25 years taken does not include an appeal. This was the world’s
worst industrial disaster, where the accused were guilty of about 15
thousand deaths. The decision of the Chief Judicial Magistrate was
pronounced in June 2010, whereas the incident took place way back in
December 1984. Such is the situation in India!
There
is one illusion to be cleared before we start to get into the causes
for the pendency of cases. There are two main factors for such
pendency, firstly that the rate of disposal of cases is slow and
secondly and more importantly the rate of institution of cases is
considerably high. It is very important for us to understand that
pendency has been increasing not due to the rate of disposal of cases
but due to the increasing rate of institution of cases. Statistics
show that the rate of disposal of cases has improved drastically, but
despite this, the pendency has been increasing, and the main reason
of this can be attributed to the fact that number of cases being
instituted every year is very high. This shows we need better
infrastructure to deal with the increasing number of new cases.
