The Constitution of India is upholded by the Supreme Court and subordinated courts as “law of land”.It aims of ensuring the political, social as well as economic forms of justice to each and every citizen of India. Citizens if having any greivance approaching courts to seek redressal as refraining from taking law in their hands as court of India follows the principle of “no innocent shall be convicted even at the cost of acquittal of hundreds of culprits” so justice could be delivered with impartiality, fairness, equality that is rule of law.
However, with the number of cases that are pending in the Court, sometimes the parties feel that the Justice delayed is Justice denied. They sometimes regret the fact that they approached the Court and invested so much of time and energy in seeking Justice. But what is the reason, why the litigants and the citizens of the Country feel that the Courts are nothing but a waste of time and money. It is high time that, we as a part of this Judicial system ensure that the litigant does not feel deprived of justice.
Hereunder are the few Shortcomings of the Present Day Judiciary, which can be rectified in Future, if we all wish to work towards it.
Frivilous Litigation
The number of frivilous litigations that are filed in this Country are immense. Most of the times, people file cases just to satisfy their ego. There are many cases, which can be resolved, when two people decide to sit across the table and have a word with each other. There is no account of the number of fake cases that are initiated by the parties, when they want to harass the other person. It would really be helpful, if we as lawyers and litigants, understand, if a case really needs to be filed before the Court or the same can be resolved by Alternate Dispute Resolution.
Lack of useage of Alternate Dispute Resolution
Despite the number of Circulars and Judgments passed by the Supreme Court, there is no such attempt made by the Advocates and the parties, to understand Alternate Dispute Resolution. ADR includes Arbitration, Mediation and Concilitation. These are the processes, which ensure speedy justice and less burden on the Court. Yet, not many lawyers encourage their clients to opt for mediation because they are scared that they may loose a client.
Unnecessary Adjournments
There is famous proverb of “justice delayed is justice denied” and India’s legal system is one of the largest stock of pending cases and day by day the list of cases are increasing and it itself is inadequacy of system and the problems of the offenders waiting long for their trials and spending more time then the actual trial and had to face the pain and agony and expenses and after that also, justice would be served to them or not is not sure because rich by giving money, mould the justice in their favour as corruption is rampant.
This problem exist due to various reasons such as unfilled vacancies as lack of judges is one of the major reason for pendency as the ratio of judges in India is much less than the other countries, misuse of the procedural law as unreasonable adjournment by the lawyer because of his attitude towards the particular case as unwillingly to put the end to case and ensure justice to his client, state is one of the largest litigator, largest number of appeals to higher courts against the orders of lower court, indiscriminate and inadequate system to monitor the bunch of cases. The process of court is lengthy, rigid and more formal. The problem is quite alarming.
This problem can be resolved by Lawyers themselves, if they just refuse to take adjournments in a particular case, then the pendency of cases will reduce at large numbers.
Corruption
Sad to admit it here but just like every department in this Country, Corruption is also present in the Judiciary. The difficulty in dealing with departments has been experienced by every lawyer in their years of practice. One of the major challenge in the India’s legal system is corruption because of which the image of Indian law is suffering a stain on it because of the illegal gratifications by some of the high integrity members, by accepting pecuniary benefits and get lured with money and completely destroyed it by political influences.
Digitization of Records
Even though the High Courts are now completely Digitised, there are still rural courts, which are far away from the same. Along with the digitisation, it is important that the people are also qualified enough to handle the digital system. The High Court and the Supreme Court, has a lot of Data available online, such as the Bench Assignment, Court Orders uploaded, the status of the case etc. But it is not available for the lower courts or the courts in rural areas. nic website is a good source of information but the same needs to be more faster and updated in order to save more time and cost.
A digitalized society is what the running government aim for and it work for it also but unfortunately the Indian judiciary does not attain the status of digitalization, if it attains it will save a lot of time of paper work, so efforts to make it a digitalized judicial system to be made in this medical crises, online dealing of cases. as it will prevent cost and time both as International Courts of Britain and Switzerland adopted the same as Justice can’t wait to be done.
Update Laws and Lack of Judges
The Indian judiciary has to go with the present society’s condition and not only the British made laws and judges to have clear instructions of what kind of cases to be admitted in the court of law and the citizen should also not false cases for their personal gains.The Indian law also lacks as the size that India and Indian population has, increase in the number of judges and filled the vacancies can be a effective solution, though it is not easy process but efforts to develop the system has to be done.
There is no perfect society. Still we can always strive to live in a better society. Even though we know one person cannot change the entier Country overnight, but we can all make an attempt to change a bit of the society ourselves. As lawyers, let us not encourage our clients to file cases just to satisfy their ego, but encourage them to fight for justice if wrong has been done against them. As lawyers let us not encourage false cases to be filed.
Instead of cribbing about the system, which is imperfect and has its own set of flaws, let us admit that there is a problem, for which We will be the solution.
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