Reimagining the lower judiciary

In Tareekh Pe Justice: Reforms for India's District Courts, authors Prashant Reddy and Chitrakshi Jain flip the iconic Tareekh Pe Tareekh dialogue from a Hindi film to offer a long-term cure for India's chronic courtroom ills.

- NEHA BHATT

Their diagnosis sharply contrasts with the conventional debates on what ails the judiciary. It comes at a time when the sluggish pace of courts no longer raises as many eyebrows, with inertia and apathy baked into the system over decades. There have been occasional calls for change—such as by President Droupadi Murmu, who recently criticised the culture of adjournments, with judgments delivered after a generation had passed, and the judicial process becoming a source of great misery, especially for the poor—but there is little institutional change.

The judiciary's immediate challenges—over 50 million cases pending in courts, with an average of 10 years to resolve each case—have primarily been attributed to overburdened courts and a shortage of resources. The authors, both legal researchers, challenge this popular narrative, offering a compelling counterargument: "The Indian judiciary has been incredibly successful in pushing the 'resource crunch' narrative to explain its extraordinary inefficacy." In reality, both central and state governments have increased the number of judges in the district judiciary from 7,675 to 25,511 between 1987 and 2023, with ₹10,000 crore allocated for infrastructure and judicial modernisation since 1993-94. These investments, the authors contend, have had no significant impact on the backlog of cases. Could resource scarcity be a misdiagnosis to escape broader institutional failures?