At a time when even the Chief Justice of India failed to stop sheding his tears publically in the presence of the Prime Minister for sheer injustice to crores of citizens caused by almost unconquerable mountain of pending cases in courts, a Deputy Commissioner in Jharkhand has shown the way how situations like this could be avoided with determination.
Dumka DC Rahul Kumar Sinha has succeeded in bringing the number of pending cases in his court down to absolute zero just in one year. Some of the cases that he has disposed were dated back to first half of 1980s.
According to the District Public Relations Office of the district, there is no pending or fresh case related to anything in existance in Dumka DC court as of now. Speaking about this success, Sinha said that there were 513 pending cases as of February 17 last year, followed by 44 fresh ones. After including review petitions also, they had a total of 628 cases to be disposed off.
Sinha said that one case from 1982-83 and 1985-86 each, two cases of 1983-84 and 1986-87 each, four cases of 1994-95 and six cases of 1987-88 were the ones which clearly show how loopholes of the system have been cleverly used.
Ajay Nath Jha, Deputy Director, Department of Information and Public Relations, Dumka said that one of the unique qualities that Sinha came up with althrough was that before hearing he studied related cases, extended his court to twice a week (which usually happens only weekly in other DC courts) to speed up hearing processes.
Sinha said,”Delay created by lower courts in getting records and files of the cases was also one of the key roadblocks. We tried our best to overcome this. Requesting for next date or Taareekh is something which, many a times, is used only to delay the justice and it has made a mockery of our judicial system. We tried to cut this short by giving dates as early as possible, and also taking notes of return arguements from those who argued without proper information about the case.”