NEW DELHI: Usually, it’s the litigants chasing the lawyers. But a team of 20 young lawyers are busy tracking litigants who have registered themselves with the Supreme Court Legal Services Committee (SCLSC) for getting legal aid. This is to bring down the pendency of cases in the country’s top court under an initiative called SAHYOG, launched earlier this year.
Advocates enrolled with the SCLSC have zeroed in on 1,188 cases that can easily be disposed of, but have still not been closed as some necessary documents have not been submitted. Of these, 776 are criminal cases and 412 are civil matters, with the oldest four cases dating back to 2005. Now the team, selected by SCLSC, is trying to contact these litigants (or their nearest kin) in an attempt to get such cases closed. Thanks to the cumulative effect of SAHYOG, the total backlog of cases taken up by the SCLSC has come down from 3,800 cases in January this year to 2,144 in September.
This year, the total number of fresh applications that the SCLSC had received by September 22 was 1,156. On an average, the SCLSC receives 150-175 legal aid applications every month from various State Legal Services Authorities, committees, jails and other applicants across the country.
The lawyers have reached out to the litigants at their homes to collect case documents and then filed them in court. To contact jail inmates, they use the video conferencing facility, launched by the SC.
Senior advocate Bishwajit Bhattacharyya took up a case of a senior citizen under SAHYOG and visited his house in Ghaziabad personally to collect the documents as the man couldn’t travel because of his illness. “The case was pending with the SCLSC for almost four years. I personally went to his residence and got the relevant documents required for filing the case,” Bhattacharyya said.
Headed by a Supreme Court judge (currently Justice Madan B Lokur), the SCLSC has nine members in its executive body. Currently, the SCLSC has 29 senior advocates and 53 advocates-on-record on its active panel, who work pro-bono. The SCLSC provides pro-bono legal services to litigants who are entitled to it under Section 12 of the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987 to people whose annual income does not exceed Rs 1.25 lakh; women; children and senior citizens.
SCLSC doing major pro-bono work
The SCLSC provides legal services free of cost to litigants who are entitled for it under Section 12 of the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987 to people whose annual income does not exceed C1.25 lakh; women; children; senior citizens; differently-abled; victims of human trafficking, mass disaster, ethnic violence, caste atrocities, flood, drought, earthquake and industrial disaster; and members of the SC and ST. Persons in custody and workmen also get legal help irrespective of their financial status.