The judiciary is slow and clogged — it’s time to get outside help to fix it

The extent of inefficiency within the system had been uncovered by the Delhi High Court’s Zero Pendency Courts project, supported by Daksh, a Bengaluru-based research organisation, which had found that 55 per cent of a judicial officer’s day in the criminal courts is spent on routine administrative tasks such as issuing summons and setting dates, rather than substantive judicial work. Time and motion studies from the states revealed the extent of administrative bloat that hampers judicial productivity.

In an average district or subordinate court, about half of the 90 cases listed daily reportedly get adjourned. In the absence of consistent case-flow management systems, monitoring disposal becomes skewed. Poor infrastructure, including the shortage of courtrooms, a 21 per cent shortage of judicial officers in the district as well as civil judges’ cadres, and non-adherence to the timelines on recruitment, stipulated by the Supreme Court, have been documented officially. Despite a welcome focus on e-filing and digitisation, half the district courts still do not have video conferencing-enabled computers on the judge’s desk.

There is a 27 per cent shortage of non-judicial staff across the country. Some states like Bihar, Rajasthan and Telangana had shortages veering nearer to 50 per cent. Without the tools to function, the best judicial officers cannot work, let alone do justice. And unless case flow is watched and managed, delays can never be overcome. No doubt the recent amendments to the erstwhile CrPC and CPC have introduced provisions to hasten faster disposal of criminal and civil cases, but without people to oversee the implementation, change may take years to fructify.

If the courts are to be unclogged, something out-of-the-box must be done. The suggestion is to learn from three successful strategies. Old as they are, they make a point. The first is the Cataract Blindness Project of the 1990s, under which 11 million sight-restoring surgeries (using intraocular lenses for the first time) were conducted in seven states of India in just five years. The coordination needed was immense, as thousands of patients had to be transported from their villages to the district hospital, fed, housed, operated upon and sent home post-surgery. The logistics were successfully tackled by enlisting retired and locally available armed forces personnel to handle coordination. That freed up ophthalmic surgeons to focus exclusively on the operations. The project was a runaway success.

Even further back, in the 1960s, magistrates in Delhi balanced judicial, revenue and law-and-order functions and still disposed of 60 warrant cases each month. The only thing which worked was the intense scrutiny that their disposal was subjected to by the (then) single District Magistrate, Delhi, who read out individual performance reports in a meeting hall full of magistrates. This monthly meeting became the best tonic to boost performance. Indeed, to meet Justice Khanna’s maxim about measuring court performance, this is the only way of finding high (and low) performers. But it will materialise only if the High Courts that have supervisory authority over the lower courts start open reviews of case disposal.

The high courts already have case-flow management rules that allow for a delegation of functions. But the implementation has been lacklustre due to a shortage of qualified people in the court registries. If the aim is to give judicial officers more time to focus on substantive judicial work, there is a temporary way: Inducting retired officials from the vast pool available within giant organisations like the Indian Railways, the countrywide postal services, senior accounts officers from the Indian Accounts organisation, would be efficient and economical. The resultant payouts would be inexpensive and cost-effective because pensioners can only receive their last pay drawn, minus pension.

I have tried this and I know. Retired officers were inducted from the office of the Controller of Accounts by me; people who had never handled health or population and who had just retired. They managed every administrative task, big and small, in record time, because organisations and methods remain the hallmark of administration and work on the principles of workflow management. These do not change, be it in health, education, the railways or the courts. If the aim is to divest administrative responsibilities and give judicial officers more time to do substantive judicial work, available skills should be used before dreaming of cadres of court managers.

Implementing such reforms does not require a structural overhaul of India’s legal framework — only administrative will. A collaborative effort between the state law secretaries, the high court registrars, district judges and requesting top organisations to help find suitable retired administrative officers could accomplish this or something even better. Only if judicial officers can focus on judicial work can one start to measure high and low performance.

Is the idea of inducting experienced outsiders a radical one? Only if one considers streamlining efficiency to be radical. The result could be a leaner, faster, and fairer justice system — a goal worth fighting for.

The writer is former secretary in the Ministry of Health