Judiciary

The famous ‘Hamlet Soliloquy’ by name ‘To be or not to be’ cites ‘law’s delay’ as one of reason why one might contemplate suicide.

Indian judiciary has four problems.

First is Indian judicial system does not support access to judicial system to common people. Common people cannot afford lawyers.

Second problem is delay in judicial procedures and long list of pending cases.

Third problem is that judicial decision may be due to extraneous reasons – corruption or incompetence.

Fourthly judiciary has become elitist and disconnected to poor people.

There are three pronged approach needed to solve judicial problems.

The first is that we simplify procedures of court – this will allow poor people access to court and speed up disposal of cases.

Increase the number of judges in court. The law commission has recommended that number of judges be increased five fold from present 15000.

There is need to improve method of selection of judiciary to get good quality of judges. There should be a professional full time body for selection of judges.

Corruption in judiciary can be checked by proper selection and having a full time body for monitoring judges for accountability.

Corruption in judiciary may be due to lack of accountability.

The incentive for corruption in judiciary is huge. Furthermore there is no disincentive for corruption due to lack of accountability.

Almost no judge has been booked in last 50 years, despite some estimates that as many as 50% of judges could be corrupt.

While election to judiciary is not possible, selection must be broad based.

Further judgements need not be long and can be made succinct. Consumers of justice – people - must put pressure on government to improve judiciary


Challenges

1. Neither government, nor judiciary is interested in improving judiciary.
2. Government wants a dysfunctional judiciary.
3. Judiciary itself may be beneficiary of corruption and hence not interested in improvement of corruption.
4. System of democracy has been corrupted.
5. There is no legal avenue to check corruption in judiciary, including RTI.