^{July 17, 2021}
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Missing lords
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Debate the Debates

Edition 19

Good morning. The Indian judiciary is the third pillar of democracy. Naturally, there is a lot of responsibility on the judges and courts. Over the years, there has been a rising concern on the functioning of the system of courts. There have been an increasing number of pending cases. The backlog of cases in the Supreme Court alone stands at 69,212, add to that 58.53 lakh pending cases in High Courts. In this backdrop, former Central Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi gave a series of suggestions that could solve the issue.

Shailesh Gandhi claims that appointing more judges by filling the vacancies and using technology are some of the important solutions to tackle the problem. However, Prashant Reddy T, a lawyer by profession, strongly opposes his views stating that the efficiency of judges is different and increasing the number of judges is not the right approach.

Will more judges and usage of technology reduce pending cases?

“Yes”, argued Shailesh Gandhi:

He wrote, “While there were variations in States, the average disposal per judge across the nation for 12 years was 2,633 cases for the High Courts with a standard deviation of 8% and 1,217 cases with a standard deviation of just 6% for the subordinate courts.

This made us realise that it was possible to make a reasonable forecast for the requirement of judges and that the “rate of disposal” method would give good guidance.”

Read the article here.

“No”, countered Prashant Reddy T:

He argued, “Even presuming these numbers are available and we can figure out the exact number of judges required, there is still the question of “efficiency” of judges in managing their courtrooms. As any lawyer will tell you, the efficiency of judges varies widely across the board and disposal rates are not always an indicator of efficiency.” 

Read the article here.