[Part of the problem is simply the lack of judges. The Chief Justice
accused the Modi government of sitting on 170 recommendations for
judges to the High Courts. He said there are 434 judicial vacancies in
the High Courts waiting to be filled. The numbers when it comes to
case pendency in India’s courts is mind-boggling. Five crore cases are
filed everyday – while only 2 crore are disposed of by the judiciary.
That’s a backlog of 3 crore cases, every day. The 1986 Law Commission
had pointed out that there were only 10 judges for every million
Indians when there should be at least 50 judges for every 10 lakh.]

http://scroll.in/article/807142/the-daily-fix-why-is-fixing-indias-judiciary-not-part-of-the-discussion-around-development

Why is fixing India’s judiciary not part of the discussion around development?

2 hours ago
Updated 2 hours ago
Shoaib Daniyal

Order, order?

On Sunday, addressing Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Chief Justice
of India did something unusual: he started to cry. What had pained him
was the state of the Indian judiciary and the Union government’s
inaction on the matter. Chief Justice Tirath Singh Thakur accused the
Modi government of stalling the appointment of judges to the High
Courts and for doing nothing to increase the number of courts and
judges in the country. “Therefore not only in the name of the
litigant… the poor litigant languishing in jail but also in the name
of the country and progress, I beseech you to realise that it is not
enough to criticise the judiciary,” Thakur said, breaking down.

Here’s another incident to show how the Indian public views the
judiciary: In 2015, Delhi promised that people helping road accident
victims would have the right to remain anonymous to the police.
Indians have got used to this – but this is a shocking example of what
we’ve been reduced to. So scared are people of getting caught in
“court-kachheri” trouble that they’d rather let a man bleed out on the
road than get involved in a decades-long case.

***Part of the problem is simply the lack of judges. The Chief Justice
accused the Modi government of sitting on 170 recommendations for
judges to the High Courts. He said there are 434 judicial vacancies in
the High Courts waiting to be filled. The numbers when it comes to
case pendency in India’s courts is mind-boggling. Five crore cases are
filed everyday – while only 2 crore are disposed of by the judiciary.
That’s a backlog of 3 crore cases, every day. The 1986 Law Commission
had pointed out that there were only 10 judges for every million
Indians when there should be at least 50 judges for every 10 lakh.***
[Emphasis added.]

Development has been India’s mantra since Narendra Modi’s took office
in 2014. So pervasive is this narrative that even politicians such as
Mayawati and Mamamta Banerjee have had to speak the language of
development. Yet, as the Chief Justice himself pointed out, how can
the Make in India campaign proceed without functioning courts? How can
industry and commerce thrive without a quick system of dispute
resolution? Even ignoring the elephant in the room – human rights
abuse due to pendency – why is the crucial factor of the judiciary not
taken into account by those signing the songs of “development”?

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Peace Is Doable

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