The Centre has faced flak from a Parliamentary Standing Committee for failing to explain why States with a higher case load had less number of judges as compared to other States which had higher judge strength but comparatively less cases.
This mismatch caught the attention of 29 Parliamentarians who were part of a Committee that suo moto took up the issue of ‘Inordinate Delay in Filling up of Vacancies in High Courts and Supreme Court’. In its report submitted to both the Houses of Parliament on December 8, the Committee chaired by Congress MP Anand Sharma said, “As per information available, the judge population ratio in Uttar Pradesh is at 10 per million population, which is lesser than the judge-population ratio of Maharashtra, which is 21 per million population… The cases pending at district courts in UP (53,63,613) are higher than the cases pending in district courts of Maharashtra (31,54,681).”
The committee summoned the Secretary, Department of Justice for solving this discrepancy. The Department explained that the judge-population ratio is related to the number of cases pending in the courts of that particular State. The more the number of cases, the more will be the judge strength.
The Secretary gave the instance of two High Courts to put forth his case. In Bihar, the judge-population ratio is 13 per million population while the corresponding figure in Gujarat is 20 per million population. The officer further submitted that the case load in Gujarat High Court is four times higher than the case load in Bihar High Court and this explained why Bihar had less judges compared to Gujarat.
But when the Committee confronted the Department of Justice with the example of UP vis-à-vis Maharashtra, there was no explanation. In its report, the Committee said, “The rationale of case load given by Department of Justice doesn't explain strength of the judges of Maharashtra and UP.”
It also had a reason to explain the problem faced by Bihar. The Committee felt that the lower case load could be on account of lack of access to justice to millions of poor in Bihar compared to the affluence prevailing in Gujarat. A latest report released by the Ministry of law and Justice could possibly shed some light on this fact. The report concluded that pendency of cases could not be linked to shortage of judges.
It explained by showing that states such as Delhi, Kerala and Haryana fared better on the socioeconomic scales and hence had a relatively higher rate of institution of cases than states such as Jharkhand and Bihar which have low institution per annum. Also, there is variation in the number of disposal per judge per year. For instance, in Kerala and Tripura, the rate of disposal per judge is as high as 3028 and 2825 cases respectively, while in states such as Jharkhand and Bihar, the rate of disposal per judge is at 255 and 274 cases respectively.
The Committee asked the Government to rework the criteria for determining the judge-population figure as India fares very badly in terms of judge strength. Despite being the second populous country in the world, India has 21320 judges which works to about 18 judges per million population while China, the most populous country, has over two lakh judges. Even US, France and Australia have impressive judge population ratio of 108, 124, 40 per million population respectively.