CHENNAI: Supreme Court judge Justice F M Ibrahim Khalifulla on Saturday came down heavily on 'kangaroo courts', said the judiciary will never allow such courts to function.
The judge said the need of alternative dispute resolution has become indispensable because of four constraints in the judiciary such as lack of necessary infrastructure, enormous growth in the number of litigations, number of judges in ratio
of population and above all the people's faith in the system.
"Even if there is rise in number of litigations, we will not allow kangaroo courts and katta panchayats...," the judge said, speaking at the inaugural function of Southern Regional Conference of Mediation and Conciliation.
In India the ratio is eight judges for ten million people while in other countries it is 50 for one million people, he said, adding it is such a constraint that make the judiciary to search for alternative dispute resolutions.
Another Supreme Court judge, Justice Madan B Lokur, who is also a member of Supreme Court Mediation and Conciliation Project Committee, inaugurating the conference, said mediators should be unbiased and neutral.
Stating there was proposal to introduce pre-litigation cases to mediation centres, Justice Lokur said Section 9 of the Civil Procedure Code provides for settlements through mediation. He said the object of mediation and conciliation will be fulfilled only if it succeeds by taking litigations to the grassroots level that is to the district level.
The apex court committee has made sufficient progress in taking it to grassroot levels in Kerala, Jharkhand, Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra and Delhi and proposed to take it to Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir and Chhattisgarh by 2015.
Justice Satish K Agnihotri said the number of pending cases in district and subordinate courts was around 2,69,39,256, adding it would take another 316 years to clear them if special steps were not taken.