Justice delayed is justice denied vs Justice hurried is justice buried!

19 JAN 2015

   The need for effective management of and re-engineering the entire justice delivery system in India:

Assuming industries in both the public sector and the private sector operate the way our justice delivery system functions, for example, our entire Industrial sector would have come to a halt ….and naught. I can hear some murmur in defense that the justice system cannot be compared to industry. But alas, when it comes to management, both are pretty much the same!

When faced with a similar situation – in fact much less serious than this- in other walks of life, we do what we call re-engineering the entire process concerned. It looks like the judicial system administration has not seen anything like management effectiveness for decades! The huge backlog (some 2.8 crore pending cases) is a natural consequence of this. The reality that we face today is – “justice delayed is justice denied”. The current administrators of the justice delivery system counter this by saying that “justice hurried is justice buried!” The fact is that the productivity of our current justice delivery system is awfully low. We are all made to understand and swallow the excuse for this awfully low productivity “justice hurried is justice buried” But ensuring justice when? After two generations? This kind of delay in the delivery of justice that we are experiencing is a mockery of justice and is at least as bad as delivering “justice” after two generations.

I remember an article by Mr. V. Venkatesan on the centre page of the Hindu dated May 27, 2013 on the subject. He talked about only one ill that ails management of the civil justice delivery system namely the awfully low number of judgments given by the judges, not just at the Supreme Court but more so at the High court and much more so at the small courts. But there are many more ills that ails all courts in the country!

People who are connected with the justice delivery system are certainly sensitive to the damage that the delay is causing to the society at large. But the solution they offer itself will take such a long time to materialize. For example they talk about multiplying the number of courts. Even if we assume this increase can be done faster, if we simply increase the number of courts without taking a critical look at the current process of the justice delivery system, the increase in number of courts will only add to the cost of the Nation rather than solving the problem.

Surely, the entire justice delivery process needs to be re-engineered. This is done by getting to a few root-causes of the disease that has already grown to be an epidemic.

We give our submissions and suggestions towards this end in the coming installments.

One affected indian Bakra/bakri in the service of the people of India.