NEW DELHI: For Dipti Sharma, who is employed at the Delhi’s Patiala House Court, the time between 3 and 4 pm is very crucial on all working days as she is busy compiling the day’s developments to be sent to the Delhi High Court.
In order to manage the plaguing problem of pendency of cases, the Delhi High Court, in its new set of guidelines for promotion of subordinate judges, has made it compulsory that every judge should send daily reports of their day’s proceedings in a prescribed format by 4 pm each day.
“Earlier, such reports were sought on monthly basis. But to fix the accountability of every judicial officer, we had decided to seek reports on a daily basis and monitor their progress. We have given two targets to lower judiciary to fight pendency — cases pending for 10 years and five years respectively — and then fix the target dates for disposal of each case. We are quite satisfied after witnessing the positive outcome,” said a judicial officer associated with the disposal committee.
According to the guidelines, there will be five parameters on which the performance of the judge will be ascertained — excellent, very good, good, satisfactory, and poor.
For the assessment, not only quantity but quality too will matter as per the new norms. A magistrate court in Delhi, to get the excellent report, will have to record testimonies in 8 to 10 cases apart from the miscellaneous cases and at least the disposal of two contested cases on merits. For very good performance, the judge has to record the statement of 6 to 8 individuals and disposal of miscellaneous cases and two contested cases on merits.
Similarly, the performance parameter remains the same for appellate courts. A monthly analysis would be done by the team of district court monitoring which then shares the report with the CJI. With the backlog touching 3.3 crore cases in India, there are 2.84 crore cases pending in the subordinate courts, the backlog clogging the HCs and Supreme Court is 43 lakh and 57,987 cases, respectively.