DC Edit | Welcome Steps By SC To Bring Relief To Litigants

Article 21 of the Constitution, which deals with the protection of life and personal liberty, mandates that no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to a procedure established by law. Unfortunately, the number of Indians being deprived of their lives and personal liberty outside the ambit of law has not come down; it only goes up every year. And it is not because gangs of criminals go after them but because the system itself has turned the law into a weapon to hunt them down. This also works like a spider casting its net from which mere mortals, once caught, are unlikely to escape.

Reports say over 5.3 crore cases are pending across all Indian courts among which around 4.7 crore are in district and subordinate courts. The figure is roughly 62 lakhs in the high courts while the Supreme Court has a backlog of over 80,000 pending matters. Another statistic that reflects this phenomenon is the 3.75 lakh undertrial prisoners who make up almost three-fourth of the total population in Indian jails! Occasionally, instances appear when the undertrial ends up serving more time than that he could have been awarded by the court had he been found guilty.

It is in this context that the Supreme Court’s directive to the high courts and the lower judiciary to expedite the judicial processes and delivery of judgments becomes pertinent. In a move that will seek to bring relief to thousands of litigants and defendants, including the innocent, the apex court has directed high courts to pronounce judgments within three months of the date of reserving them. The court also emphasised that cases of personal liberty must get precedence, something which, in an ideal scenario, the apex court need not have reminded the judges below them about.

The court’s directive that orders in bail applications should be pronounced the very same day, and if reserved, pronounced and uploaded the next day, and that order of bail or sentence suspension should be communicated to jail authorities as soon as it is pronounced with the undertrial/convict released preferably the same day or the next at the latest, aims for a transformation of sorts. The reality is that court and jail officials often do not care for constitutional niceties as they think they have the final say on the lives of those behind bars and they look for one reason or another to delay their release. Some make it an excuse to extract the last instalment of a bribe they had been forcing on the hapless relative of the prisoner.

The court has also issued an extraordinary directive which allows a party to approach the chief justice of the high court to assign the matter to another bench if the judgment is not pronounced within four months of reserving order. Once implemented, it will act as a deterrent on delinquent judges who sit on cases that bind the lives of the accused to them forever. It has set timelines, too, for uploading orders online.

Judges often attribute judicial delays to a number of reasons, but for once the Supreme Court has come up with a plan to address this problem without waiting for the government. But the government, too, must now step up and address the infrastructure and manpower issues being faced by the judiciary so that speedy justice can be availed by all.