Rules of the Law-V

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: The last part of this series on legal reform discusses some solutions to the crisis in dispute resolution. There are some generic solutions that one should mention first. First, there is the natural conclusion that the number of judges and courts needs to be increased. At a Chief Justices’ conference in 2004, a committee was constituted to get a fix on the recommended judge/case ratio and a figure of 500 to 600 was suggested for district and subordinate courts. Working with the pendency figures, this translates into an additional 35,000 courts or so, depending on how one derives the number. As mentioned earlier, the total number of courts right now is 12,148. Alternatively, one can work with the judge/population ratio. In its 120th report (1987), the Law Commission stated that the number of judges per million population should increase from 10.5 to 50. These targets were repeated by the Supreme Court. That figure of 10.5 is often quoted, but is somewhat suspect. On 31st December 2007, the sanctioned strength in district and subordinate courts was 15,917. Because of a large number of vacancies (with large numbers in UP, Andhra, Maharashtra, West Bengal and A&N Islands, Gujarat, Karnataka, MP, Bihar and Uttarakhand), the working strength was only 12,549. However, even if one works with the sanctioned strength, the judge/million population ratio is a shade lower than 7, not 10.5. If the 50 target is accepted, this works out to an additional 98,000 judges. On 22nd April 2008, the High Courts had a sanctioned strength of 876 judges and a working strength of 594. Vacancies were concentrated in Allahabad (with a very high number of 92), Bombay and Punjab & Haryana.