Millions of Indians wait for justice for years from a system that is being crushed by its own weight. India’s justice system needs urgent attention. Despite numerous chief justices underlining the need to fill vacancies of judges, the government has dragged its feet. Judicial reforms have been debated for years and discussion around it continues. India has a huge number of pending cases. It is going to take decades for these cases to be heard. Justice delayed is justice denied. There were 35.34 million cases pending in district courts and another 4.75 million others in High Courts. Over the last two years, pending cases have mounted by over 10 percent in High Courts (44.25 lakh) and 5 percent (2.97 crore) in subordinate courts. That courts are saddled with poor infrastructure adds to the problem.

The India Justice Report 2020 recently released by Tata Trusts has once again shown the spotlight the state of India’s justice delivery system. The report which is India’s only ranking of states on delivery of justice ranked Maharashtra as the best-performing state. The other states in the top five are Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Punjab and Kerala. Among the 18 major states, the worst in terms of justice-delivery are Karnataka, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. Among the seven small states that have a population of less than a crore, the best-performing states were Tripura followed by Sikkim and Himachal Pradesh.

VACANCIES AMONG JUDGES WORRYING
    
The Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad recently informed the Lok Sabha that there are a total of 419 vacancies of judges in 25 high courts across the country. In the Supreme Court, there are four vacancies.  Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta High Courts have 31, 30 and 40 vacancies respectively. The sanctioned strength of High Court Judges at present is 1080 in the country.

The national average of vacancies among judges in the High Court was as high as 38%. Vacancies in the Subordinate Courts stood at 22%. The highest number was in Meghalaya: 60%. On average, one in three judges in the High Court were missing and one in four among subordinate judges. In fact, between 2016-17 and 2018-19, vacancies increased in 10 High Courts and 15 subordinate courts. Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Jharkhand, Delhi, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Puducherry and Meghalaya, have over 25 percent vacancies. At 70% Andhra Pradesh registers the largest vacancy amongst High Court judges. 

In Bihar, West Bengal, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Puducherry, Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli there is only one judge for over 1,00,000 people. 

Only six states have just one judge for more than 10,00,000 people. With one judge for every two-lakh people, Sikkim has the best judge to population ratio. With the exception of Chandigarh, no single High Court in states or Union Territories had a full complement of judges. One in every three posts for High Court judges lay vacant, and in the subordinate courts, one in every four. Among the 27 states and Union Territories, there is just one subordinate court judge for over 50,000 people!  Way back in 1987, the Law Commission had recommended a judge-to-population ratio of one judge for every 20,000 people.  Clearly, we have a long way to go even to get the minimum number of judges.

CLEARANCES OF CASES POOR

Between 2018-19, the general case clearance rates (the rate at which a court disposes pending cases over a year) fell in higher and subordinate courts.  Sixteen states and Union Territories including Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and Rajasthan, showed falling case clearance rates in 2018-19, while the high courts of Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Andhra Pradesh managed to clear only 38% in 2018-19.
 
LEGAL AID

In a country with its typical problems of illiteracy and poverty, legal aid can perform a major role in helping people deal with legal issues and delivery of justice. However, barely 1.5 crore people got legal aid in the last 25 years, though 80% of the population is entitled to it.

Since 2009, paralegal volunteers, who are embedded in local communities, have been their vital link with legal services. Ideally, every District Legal Services Authority or DLSA should have 50 active paralegals. This means that in 669 DLSAs, there must be around 33,450 paralegals. In 2019, the count at 69,290 stood at more than double. In 2020, the numbers dwindled by 36 %. Yet, it still stands at just over 51,000 or nearly 53% over the suggested numbers. 

However, their presence across states, Union Territories and districts is uneven. Nagaland, Jammu and Kashmir, Assam, Chandigarh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu, Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Rajasthan, Sikkim and Uttar Pradesh have less than the required numbers. 

To ensure that legal assistance reaches the remotest parts, the NALSA 2011 Regulations require a legal clinic be set up in all villages or that there be at least one for a reasonable cluster of villages. In 2020, there were only 14,159 clinics for India’s 600,000 villages. This averages out to 42 villages per clinic. The figure has stayed the same since 2017. At present, only Rajasthan, Kerala, Puducherry and Tripura have provisions for legal service clinics to cover, on average, less than 10 villages. There is only one legal clinic among 42 villages, but there should be one in every village. 

PRISONERS AND PRISONS IN A SAD STATE

Two-thirds of India’s prisoners have not been convicted so far. In 2019, the convict prison population grew more than the undertrial prison population. As of December 2019, the nationwide prison occupancy rate stood at 119% with prisons in Delhi overcrowded by as much as 75% while those in Uttar Pradesh by nearly 70%. The most overcrowded prisons were Central (124%) and District jails (130%).
There is little movement toward correction and rehabilitation. Overcrowding coupled with staff shortages at all levels, low salaries, poor training, long hours, characterise prison administrations across states. 

OVERCROWDED PRISONS

As of 2019, India’s 1,350 jails held 4,78,600 inmates. Overcrowding stood at 119%, an increase of 10.5% over 2016. 69% of this population are people awaiting completion of investigation or trial. 
Much of the overcrowding continues to be because of the huge number of undertrials in custody awaiting investigation, inquiry, or trial. They constitute nearly 70% of all prison inmates. Over five years, the share of undertrial prisoners shows an increasing trend in 23 states and Union Territories.  For every convict, India has two undertrials in its jails. In 35 States and Union Territories, the share of undertrial inmates was above 50 percent of the prison population.
The lockdown hurt prisoners’ rights due to delays and lack of access to lawyers and courts. Video-conferencing was only a partial remedy. 
16 states and Union Territories report that 90% of their jails have video-conferencing facilities. Five of the large and mid-sized states had less than 50% of their jails equipped with video-conferencing facilities; Kerala (42%); Rajasthan (38%); West Bengal (32%); Karnataka (31%); and Tamil Nadu (9%). Nagaland, Mizoram and Sikkim’s jails had none equipped for video-conferencing. 

TECHNOLOGY: LONG WAY TO GO

The pandemic has highlighted the need for speedier incorporation of technology into the justice system.

Technology will undoubtedly grease the wheels of justice delivery. The COVID-19 pandemic underlined the importance of using technology in the courts. However, the use of this technology without rigorous oversight, monitoring and evaluation continue to throw up grave doubts about its impact on the right of the accused to a fair trial.

•    Only 60% of jails are now equipped with video conferencing facilities.
•    Only Punjab and Himachal Pradesh’s state citizen portals scored 90% in terms of accessibility of services and availability of state language. 

CITIZEN’S PORTALS

In 2009, the central government launched the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System for “creating a comprehensive and integrated system for enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of policing through adopting of the principle of e-Governance”. 
One segment on this portal provides for online services and information at the click of a button through citizen’s portals. Each state portal is expected to have information garnered from every police station. 

According to data by the Ministry of Home Affairs (July 2019), the government is expected to link up 14,000 of India’s 15,000 police stations to this system. As of 2019, the target had been largely met except for 958 police stations. 

State citizen portals are expected to provide 9 services—filing online complaints; obtaining the status of that complaint; obtaining copies of FIRs; viewing details of arrested persons/wanted criminals; viewing details of missing/kidnapped persons, unidentified dead bodies; viewing details of stolen/recovered vehicles, arms, stolen property; requests for issue/renewal of NOCs; and verification requests for employment, passport and so on. The portal also allows standard forms to be downloaded. 

Only Punjab and Himachal Pradesh scored 90%. This was followed closely by Chhattisgarh (88%), Maharashtra (88%) and Andhra Pradesh (86%). Bihar is the only state without a portal. 

Users face numerous problems of accessibility to these services. A number of portals did not work despite repeated attempts over three months to access them even on the specific browser mentioned on the portals. Among them are Mizoram, Rajasthan, Lakshadweep, Uttarakhand, Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Tripura. 

Most sites were available in English or Hindi, but not necessarily in the state language. The Delhi portal, for instance, was available only in English while in Jharkhand and Punjab, only certain sections of the site, or one service, was in Hindi or Gurmukhi. 

For Jammu and Kashmir, there was no ready option to translate the page and for access, the site requested the user to download the Urdu script. With these gaps, the citizen portals fell short of their objective of enabling easy access to select policing services.

LEGAL AID

In a poor country like India where a large section of the population is also illiterate, legal aid to ensure justice to the marginalised becomes crucial. The legal aid set-up became an integral part of the E-courts project with the launch of Phase II in 2014. The offices of the DLSA and Taluka Legal Services Committee are required to work in tandem with the courts to hold Lok Adalats, the listing of cases in Lok-Adalats, cause lists, proceedings, and orders which require offices to be integrated with rest of the court’s digital infrastructure. 

As of 2020, the DLSAs in 22 states and UTs, including Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Goa and Delhi are not linked to the e-courts system. Linking elsewhere is at best partial. 

Among large and mid-sized states, only Chhattisgarh shows 87% of its 23 DLSAs as linked to the e-courts system, followed by Madhya Pradesh (28%) and Haryana (9%). Among the small states, only Sikkim reports that all four of its DLSAs are linked. 
Video-conferencing facilities are rarely used by empanelled lawyers to appear for cases. Between 2019 and 2020, panel lawyers in only 14 states utilised available video conferencing facilities to appear for cases, the most instances being recorded in Madhya Pradesh (435). This was followed by Jammu and Kashmir (57), Punjab (40) and Jharkhand (39).

Justice Madan B Lokur has pointed out that it is high time some of the existing antiquated laws and practices are junked like the Prisons Act, 1984, and the Prisoners Act, 1900. 

Justice Lokur wrote in the foreword of the report: “We also need a cadre of well-trained magistrates who will continue to uphold the maxim, ‘bail not jail’ as the norm.”  Scores of activists who have done a lot of yeoman service for the marginalised are today behind bars and have been repeatedly denied bail. It has been squarely criticised by human rights activists. It is time for the government to listen to such advice if it wants any credibility both at the national and international level.

(Ramesh Menon is an author of six books, is a recipient of  the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism, has produced documentary films on social issues and the environment, is an educator and Editor-in-Chief of The Leaflet.)