May 24, 2018
On average, 1350 cases are pending with each Judge, who clears 43 cases per month.
A study conducted by a Bengaluru-based NGO has shown that a Judge in a High Court spends less than 5 minutes hearing a case, on an average.
"The most relaxed High Court Judges in the country have 15-16 minutes to hear a case, while the busiest have just about 2.5 minutes to hear a case and, on average, they have approximately 5-6 minutes to decide a case" quoted the study.
The report also said that Judges in High Courts of Kolkata, Hyderabad, Patna, Jharkhand & Rajasthan got 2 to 3 minutes on each case per day whereas Judges in High Courts of Allahabad, Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh & Odisha spent 4 to 6 minutes on each case.
As per another report by IndiaSpend, there are more than 20 million cases pending in the Indian districts courts; two-thirds are criminal cases & one in 10 have been pending for more than 10 years.
The report also said that there is 1 judge for every 73,000 people in India, seven times worse than in the United States.
On average, 1350 cases are pending with each Judge, who clears 43 cases per month. At the rate cases are handled at the district courts, civil cases will never get cleared & it will take more than 30 years to clear criminal cases.
States that build a backlog will never be able to clear their pending cases at the current rate of clearance. The 10 states with the fastest-growing backlog are Maharashtra, Gujarat, Bihar, Delhi, Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Meghalaya, Sikkim & Orissa.
Among the states clearing the case backlog, the southern states of Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana & Tamil Nadu are the best. They will clear all pending cases within 6 years. UP, which has the highest no. of pending cases per judge, will also clear pending cases within 10 years due to its high case-disposal rate.
The study was conducted by Daksh, an NGO which studies and analyses performance of the judiciary.
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