Judicial reforms!?! A brazen rhetoric, juvenile optimism or a utopian dream?

Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Dean of IIPM)

There are certain facts which are sacrosanct, but when numbers substantiate it, they only go on to glorify the magnanimity or pettiness of the same. The fact that the Indian judiciary, particularly the lower ones, have been corrupt is no news; but when Transparency International recently substantiated it with numbers, it only magnified the quantum of systemic rot that exists!

For those who did not get a chance to peruse through the ‘enlightening’ report, it states that the perception of people about nations where judiciary is corrupt is heavily tilted against India and Pakistan as compared to Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. According to the survey conducted on public perceptions by Centre for Media Studies in the year 2005, a staggering 77% of respondents believed that the Indian judiciary is corrupt. The report also points out that an astounding Rs.26.3 billion exchange hands, annually in the form of bribes. What more, the report goes on to state that this booty is shared between the lawyers, court officials, judges and middlemen with 61%, 29%, 5% and 5% as their respective shares. The enormity of the amount of money that annually exchanges hands in the form of bribes goes on to reflect the painfully sluggish justice delivery infrastructure in India. With a commendable ‘judges to people’ ratio (which currently stands at 1.3 judges per 100,000 people, as per the report), it is no wonder that the number of cases pending (as on February 2006) in Supreme Court (which has 26 judges) was 33,635; in High Courts (with 670 judges) it was a pitiable 33,41,040; and in subordinate courts (with 13,204 judges), a mind-numbing 2,53,06,458!

But then again, other than putting numbers, there is nothing new that the Transparency International’s report states that is news to us or to our government. We all knew this for long, and since decades, there had been debates, discussions and tonnes of literature written on how to set right our justice delivery. Even after all this, what has been amazing is the attitude of our consecutive governments towards the same. The intentions (or thorough lack of the same) of our political leadership to mitigate the problem are quite apparent from the amount of funds that the government had been annually allocating for the entire judiciary. Even after knowing the fact that the only solution to arrest the problem (as I had mentioned in our book The Great Indian Dream & repeatedly in our publications) is to hire more judges, create hundreds of fast track courts and clear the backlogs on a war footing; the budget allocated every year, year after year, is a chicken feed, when compared to what is actually needed to expedite the same.

It could be said without any iota of doubt that such a nonchalant attitude of our governments towards the judiciary vindicates the fact that there has been a calculative mandate behind this malaise। It has been universally observed that a corrupt judiciary seamlessly incubates a corrupt democracy, and vice versa। And for a flawless functioning of a corrupt democracy, it is imperative to maintain a status quo through an inefficient and ineffective judicial functioning – as it is only then that criminals can fearlessly and continuously make it to our Parliaments, by employing all forms of undemocratic means, creating an environment where criminalisation becomes a way of life and corruption, its inevitable flourishing medium. All in all, citizens at large have lost so much of trust in the judiciary that when a political leader talks about taking proactive remedial actions (read – judicial reforms), to them, it sounds like a well-rehearsed brazen rhetoric. And when the same comes from an active reformist, it sounds like juvenile optimism, or at best a utopian dream!

Editor in Chief : - Professor Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist)

SMS your views with your name and topic to 0-9818101234)