• According to the National Judicial Data Grid, as on Monday, September 17 evening around 23 lakh cases, which are over a decade old, are pending in various subordinate courts of the country.
• These cases constitute 8.29 per cent of the total nearly 2.50 crore cases pending in the lower courts. Of these, nearly 6 lakh cases are civil in nature and nearly 17 lakh are criminal in nature.
• Civil cases usually involve private disputes between persons or organizations. Criminal cases involve an action that is considered to be harmful to society as a whole.
• The National Judicial Data Grid is a part of the on-going e-Courts Integrated Mission Mode Project.
• The NJDG works as a monitoring tool to identify manage and reduce pendency of cases.
• The e-Committee of the Supreme Court had launched the National Judicial Data Grid to provide data on cases pending in the district courts across the country.

Vacancy in Judges

There are not enough judges (only around 21,000). Current Judge to Population ratio is 10 to 1 million.

The Law Commission report in 1987 recommends atleast 50 to 1 million. Population has increased by over 25 crore since 1987.

Increase Number of Courts:

• Indian judiciary has insufficient resources. Both Center and States are not interested in increasing spending with respect to the judiciary.
• Budgetary allocations for the whole judiciary are a pathetic 0.1% to 0.4% of the whole budget.
• India needs more courts and more benches.
• Modernization and computerization have not reached all courts.

Quality of Judges in Lower courts

• The Indian Judicial system has miserably failed to attract the best brains and the talented students.
• As the quality of judges in lower courts is not always up to the mark, appeals are filed against the decisions in higher courts, which again increases the number of cases.
• Judges lack specialization and they have turned less efficient and lazy.

Lack of Provision to Handle Fake Cases

• Fake cases and useless petitions waste time and resources, like more than 50% of cases are fake in Delhi of rape.
• This not means unproven this means fake i.e for extortion, personal grudges, marriage promises and many more immature cases.

Civil procedure code and Criminal procedure code:

These codes are in existence in our Law books from the British era. These Archaic provision should be reformed to further reduce and to some extent liberalize our society.