Courts should be dealing with serious criminal offences, not with petty cases
Indian judicial system is breaking under its own weight. The facts around the judiciary are a mockery of the whole machinery of justice in India. The numbers of cases pending and dragged have put a massive strain on the capacity of the system to support them to completion within a graceful time and with required seriousness. Justice delayed is justice denied has been upheld in full glory putting to shame to framers of the system of law in our Constitution.
The facts at hand suggest that there enormous number of cases which are added to courts and not even a quarter of them get disposed off in the same span. This happens in many cases due to an acute shortage of judges in some courts while others get lost in procedural delays as the average rates of disposal of cases per judge is abysmally low.
The reasons which have led to such alarming facts are not hidden from the system. Indian judicial system has allowed all kinds of disputes to make direct way to the courts irrespective of their gravity and intent. Resultantly, the court-processes are mired in dealing with petty and trivial issues which wastes the resources and drain the energies. These don’t give way to the serious discussions to be taken up at length which leads to uncalled-for delays. The transfer of judges in between the proceedings of a case also leads to an awful drag on the time of the petitioners and other stakeholders.
Courts should be freed from the menace of trivial issues and cases which can be handled by separate morning and evening courts who work towards permanent settlement and less of convictions. Petty cases like the ones which handle traffic challans or other minor issues should be wiped out from the system and allotted to some other institution. The reason is simple as they not only get added in huge numbers each day but also keep pending for long times.
Also, simple guidelines and timelines should be defined for different types of cases like petty case should be decided within 6 months and even the serious cases should be solved in 2 years time. However, the benchmarks should not come at the cost of compromise of due process of law and quality of judgments which are based on the procedures which are followed. The number of judges in each court should be adequate to be able to accommodate the challenge.
Fast track courts do not really represent a viable solution in all cases as many times they compromise on the procedures which leads to denial of basic rights of the petitioner and the accused.
