NEW DELHI: At a time when the Indian judiciary is weighed down by a huge burden of cases and a mounting vacancy of judicial officers, the poor infrastructure in district courts is another obstacle bogging down the institution.A study done by independent legal think tank Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy on the status of physical infrastructure in 12 district courts in Delhi-NCR presents a grim picture. The parameters for evaluating the courts included litigants’ waiting area, ground-level entry points, utility blocks and other facilities, vehicular management and access to ramps for the differently-abled, among others.
“Infrastructure has come to be valued by both the judiciary and the executive. However, the approach for the most part has tended to be a quantitative one. There seems to be less attention on the design and physical accessibility of these courts,” the think tank report stated.The courts that were part of the study included six district courts in Delhi and two each in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.
“Adequacy of judicial infrastructure is a pre-requisite for reduction of pendency and backlog of cases in courts,” the National Mission for Justice Delivery and Legal Reforms had stated in one of its reports.
The report underlined that there are only 17,576 court rooms/ halls and only 14,363 residential units available for district and subordinate courts in the country as against the sanctioned strength of 22,288 judicial officers/judges of district and subordinate courts.
The numbers highlight the state of judicial infrastructure which is overburdened with a backlog of over 23 million cases.The Department of Justice had proposed an infrastructural overhaul at a cost of `9,749 crore. The proposal included setting up of additional courts in districts that have high pendency of cases, fast-track courts to try cases of heinous crimes, more family courts, re-designing existing court complexes, digitisation of case records and capacity building.
However, successive governments have been stingy in spending money on improving court infrastructure.
In Union Budget for 2016-17, the allocation of funds for the development of judicial infrastructure was scaled down to `460 crore from `500 crore in 2015-16. Between 2011 and March 2016, the Centre released only `3,694 crore to the state governments and Union Territories for construction of court buildings and residential accommodation of judicial officers.