As pending cases in courts continue to rise, Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud has said that the judiciary needs more judges to adjudicate the cases and that steps such as the deployment of artificial intelligence are being taken to reduce the backlog.
"The judge-to-population ratio in India is amongst the lowest in the world. We need simply more Judges to adjudicate upon cases and we are engaging with the government to increase the strength of the Judiciary at all levels," the CJI said while responding to a question at the Oxford Union.
The CJI said he was trying to ensure that positions in the judiciary were not unfilled for a long period of time and the moment there were vacancies, they should be filled up beginning with the district courts and going up all the way to the Supreme Court. He said the whole issue of judicial backlog was something that was not just of concern to the judges but to the rest of society as well.
The chief justice also suggested that when a law is enacted, there should be a legislative audit of the impact on judicial infrastructure. He referred to a law on check bouncing, which was earlier a civil dispute but was converted into a criminal offense. "The dishonoring of a check was essentially a civil dispute earlier, which was converted into a criminal offense. Now what has happened, therefore, is that there has been a tremendous inflow of cases at the magisterial level," he said.
"It is important that when new laws are enacted a legislative audit has to be done of the impact of the law on the existing judicial infrastructure. And if it is going to make a demand on the judicial infrastructure, we simply have to improve the judicial infrastructure which is available."
Apart from this, Chandrachud listed the things the judiciary was doing to cut the backlog of cases. "We are using artificial intelligence for the categorization of cases so that cases involving similar issues can be dealt with by one Court one bench at the same time."
Very recently, the CJI said, one of his colleagues dealt with a case involving land acquisition where there were 750 cases that were disposed of by one single judgment. "Now, that's an area where we can employ technology to ensure that cases which involve the same issue can be dealt with clubbed and decided and disposed of together."
The chief justice said a whole host of measures had been taken to promote expedition in justice but "that's work in progress".
In December last year, the Law Ministry informed that over 5 crore cases were pending in various courts, including 80,000 in the Supreme Court. As of December 1, out of the 5,08,85,856 pending cases, over 61 lakh were at the level of the 25 High Courts, Law Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal said in a written reply to Lok Sabha.
The district and subordinate courts accounted for over 4.46 crore cases. The overall sanctioned strength of the Indian judiciary was 26,568 judges. While the sanctioned strength of the top court is 34 judges, 1,114 is the sanctioned strength of the High Courts.