Friday, 17 May, 2024
By: Yash Gupte
Between 2020 and 2022, the number of pending cases rose from 4.1 to 4.9 crore, of which 69 per cent were criminal cases. Image Source: IANS
The share of women judges in the High Courts is only 13.1 percent. There are no women judges in the High Courts of five states- Bihar, Tripura, Uttarakhand, Manipur and Meghalaya.
According to the India Justice Report 2022, Tamil Nadu has topped the chart with a score of 6.96 in case of ranking of states on the basis of ‘Judiciary.’ The southern state scored 6.96 on the scale of 10 in which the score of 10 is awarded to the best performing state whereas the poor performing states are close to the mark of ‘0.’ Tamil Nadu was followed by Karnataka with a score of 6.79 and Punjab with 6.55. Punjab was followed by Kerala and Telangana with the scores of 6.38 and 6.34 respectively. On the other side, West Bengal and Rajasthan ranked the lowest with the scores of 3.46 and 4.01 respectively. This ranking was in the case of large and mid-sized states. The report identifies the states as large and small on the basis of their population. States having a population of more than 10 million or 1 crore were considered as large states while the states with the population up to 10 million were identified as small states.
Among the small states, Sikkim secured the first rank with a score of 6.06 followed by Tripura with a score of 5.54. Goa and Himachal Pradesh performed the worst and ranked at the bottom with the scores of 3.03 and 3.17 respectively. It must be noted that according to the report, the performance of judiciary has worsened in Goa as the state had ranked second in India Justice report 2019. Goa’s rank deteriorated in 2020 as it ranked at the fourth position. Coming over to the vacancy of judges across different courts, the report reveals that as of December 2022, around 29.8 percent of the sanctioned positions of judges are lying vacant in different High Courts across the nation. Talking about the Subordinate Courts, 21.7 percent positions are vacant. Out of the total 25 High Courts in the country, there are only 5 such courts where the vacancy of judges is below 5 percent. This indicates that in 20 High Courts, more than 20 percent of seats of judges are lying vacant. Only 5 states and union territories have a case clearance rate above 100 percent in both High Court and Subordinate Courts.
Source: India Justice Report 2022
The high vacancy of judges in different courts and the high pendency of cases are the reasons behind number of problems in the country. One such problem is the overcrowding of prisons, which India Tracker had mentioned in its previous story on ‘prison statistics.’ According to a report from June 2022, The Bombay High Court is facing an acute shortage of judges as nearly 40 percent of the posts are vacant. There are 5.88 lakh cases pending before the Bombay High Court. According to the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG), there are 5.88 lakh cases pending before the Bombay High Court of which 1.14 lakh fresh cases were filed in the last one year and more than 16,000 criminal cases are pending for more than 10 years. Out of the total cases pending in the Courts across the country, nearly 1,82,000 cases have been pending for over 30 years.
Talking about the overall ranking of the states based on Police, Prisons, Judiciary and Legal Aid, Karnataka topped the chart among the large states with a score of 6.38 followed by Tamil Nadu with 6.11 and Telangana with a score of 6.11. Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal were ranked at the bottom with the scores of 3.78 and 3.88 respectively. In case of the small states, Sikkim was ranked at the top with a score of 5.01 whereas Goa performed the worst with a score of 3.42.
Coming over to the representation of women in the Indian Judiciary, the share of women judges in the High Courts is only 13.1 percent. There are no women judges in the High Courts of five states- Bihar, Tripura, Uttarakhand, Manipur and Meghalaya. The representation of women in the high courts increased by slightly less than 2 percentage points between 2020 and 2022, with Telangana growing from 7.1 to 27.3 percent. However, in other states, the proportion of women in the high courts shrank. In Andhra Pradesh, it plummeted from 19 to 6.7 percent, while in Chhattisgarh it fell from 14.3 percent to 7.1 percent.
Between 2020 and 2022, the number of pending cases rose from 4.1 to 4.9 crore, of which 69 per cent were criminal cases. The "judge to population ratio" has usually been considered as the standard in establishing the necessary number of judges since 1987, when the Law Commission of India first proposed population as an essential metric to arrive at adequate judge strength. The Commission suggested in 1987 that the current ratio of 10.5 judges per 10 lakh (1 million) people be raised to 50 judges per 10 lakh within the following five to ten years. According to population estimates for March 2022–26, India has 15 judges per 10 lakh people and 18 judges per 10 lakh when measured against the sanctioned strength as of December 2022, with a backlog of 4.8 crore cases.
Court Staff is a prerequisite for efficient functioning of the Judiciary and the vacancies severely limit the judicial capability. High courts nationwide experienced an average court staff vacancy rate of 25.6 percent, steadily increasing from 23.8 percent in 2018–19 and 22.9 percent in 2016–17. There are 51.2 percent vacancies in Andhra Pradesh's new high court, which was established in 2019. The percentage of open positions in the Bihar High Court has doubled from 26.3 percent to 52.8 percent between 2018–19 and 2021–2022.
According to a Department of Justice Report to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice, from 2018 to December 2022, 537 judges were appointed to the high courts, 1.3 percent of whom were Scheduled Tribes, 2.8 percent were Scheduled Castes, 11 percent were from the Other Backward Classes category, and 2.6 percent were from minority communities.
