Sorry State of Indian Judiciary

These days we are seeing a season of scams in our country. CAG, 2G, Adarsh, Onion etc are just to name a few. First few days are filled with blame games and then some inquiry starts and if we are lucky someone like Raja is arrested. And it is just the beginning of a process which is so long that we will die without seeing any resolution of it.

I am talking about the judicial system of India. It is so time consuming and complex that common man rightfully wants to stay away from it. "Jane do court kachahari ke chakkar main kaun fasta hai". This is one of the reason someone will pay bribe, instead of taking it to police and court.

We continuously hear stories like these

• A case of petty theft is yet to be heard. Person is in jail for more than 2 decades
• Some film-star killed sleeping poor laborers on footpath when he was drunk driving and court is yet to deliver judgement on it.
• A divorce case took more than 4 decades
• A rich guy shoots a model and it takes so many years to punish him
• Bofors case is still pending
• And so on..

These are only some of the media sensationalized stories. There are many many more in which victims are not so influential to bring out media outcry on it. Thus their cases keep on pending from one hearing to another (which maybe an year after the last one).

So what is the root cause of it? It is simply lack of courts and judges and lack of proper information system. We need to do following

1. Increase the number of courts. Make lower courts more powerful to take on smaller issues at a good speed and with more efficiency.
2. Hire more judges and competent lawyers.
3. Get away from paper based system. Have a proper digital information system, so that all the required information for a case is present to lawyers and judges whenever they want them.

All of this require a strong political motivation. As we can see that many of our politicians are already involved in one or more scams, so they have less incentive to bring any changes in judiciary. A Supreme court judge recently lamented that "Less than 1% is budgeted for Judicial System". So we as citizens need to demand from lawmakers to take corrective action in this slow functioning judiciary system.

Well all is not that gloomy. I am very happy at some of the recent developments. Right to Information Act is kind of a revolution. This is putting pressure on government officials to get their act together and making them understand that they are at their post to serve the common man not the other way around. Recently read the news that Delhi Police is putting all the FIRs online. These all are step in right direction. But a lot more need to be done and they should be done soon. Because we all know that "Justice delayed is Justice Denied".