Justice Mi Lord!

Ramakanth is a 62 year old man who has been fighting a case for his land for the last 17 years. The case is still on – but he is too weak to fight now. Too weak in body and too weak in spirit. He is seriously unwell and is not sure if the case will see closure during his lifetime. His family is also clueless of what will happen.

Ramakanth is not alone. Actually he is one of 3.5 crore Indians who have a case pending in court.

Consider this.

The average time to resolve a case in India is 15 years!

There is a backlog of 3.56 crore of cases – 50,000 in the Supreme Court itself – the highest in the history of our country. And increasing by the hour.

There are millions of under-trials languishing in our jails – just waiting for their case to come up to be heard – even though many maybe innocent. Many stay in jail much beyond what the maximum sentence for their crime would be (if convicted).

Our judicial system is creaky – just like the rest of our infrastructure.

Now consider this.

If you see the Supreme Court’s calendar for 2010 on their official website, there are 137 official holidays for 2010!!!! That amounts to 4.5 months of vacation in 2010 - even my 9 year old daughter seems to put in more hours at school than our esteemed courts!!! Unbelievable. And so what if crores of fellow Indians are languishing – waiting for our judicial system to show up.

Plus our courts work “court hours” – that means our country’s judicial infrastructure is idle for almost 2/3rd of the time – just a 33% utilization! What a gross under-utilization of precious national asset – specially with such a huge backlog which is increasing by the hour.

But wait, there is more.

Apparently, we have only around 14,000 appointed judges – as opposed to a sanctioned number of around 19,000 – so we are a whopping 5000 judges short – even though we have the budget to hire these! Forget about actually increasing the 19,000 number by another 10,000 to catch up with the backlog problem. Various state governments have brushed aside increasing this strength – citing paucity of funds! This is not on anyone’s priority. Wouldn’t it be good if our states and governments would compete to top on this front as much as they compete for financial investments.

I think if there was an Olympics gold medal – India would definitely be the undisputed leader in this category. Or a Nobel award. Or any award for that matter.

For an aspiring emerging super-power and the world’s largest democracy, our judicial system is in shambles and needs a serious re-haul – urgently. Our country definitely deserves better. Interestingly, our enterprising media does not report or push this stuff strongly – it does not seem to be on anyone’s agenda.

Our Law Minister Mr. Moily has certainly been making the right statements around judicial reforms recently and I sincerely hope he succeeds in doing whatever he says he is planning to do. But as always, there is always a slip between cup and lip – specially in politics – and very specially in our Indian politics.

Mr. Moily has been talking about reducing the pendency of cases from 15 years to 3 years.

He is talking about establishing 5000 additional courts and working in 3 shifts – which is a great idea. Of course, I hope he can find money from our esteemed Finance Minister to fund these. In India, we seem to have a very siloed approach to “planning” (anything) – like for example, the Bangalore airport got ready but our planners forgot about getting decent connectivity and roads in time! That is “another project” altogether! And of course, in our country, everyone can get away with this kind of stuff.

Mr. Moily is also talking about ramping up hiring of judges – not only back-filing the vacancies but hiring additional numbers.

And also mandating a time limit for judges to give verdicts – so cases cannot just drag along for the flimsiest of reasons.

He is also pushing the use of technology like laptops and video conferencing etc.

He is also focused on more transparency and accountability of the judiciary – more disclosures and clearer impeachment procedures in case of taints.

All great thoughts and ideas – simple and potent.

20 years ago, Dr Manmohan Singh unleashed our economic reforms in 1991 – and that changed our country forever. 20 years later, Mr. Moily has a chance to do an encore on the judicial front!

Our country definitely deserves much better than what we have today.

We need you to make this happen Mr. Moily Sir!

“Aaal is not well”.