Govt aims to speed up judicial process

NEW DELHI: If law minister Veerappa Moily���s mission is fulfilled, there will be no more stories of anyone spending a lifetime in litigation. The government is trying to cut down the life of litigation from an average 15 years to just a year.

With 2.75 crore pending cases in the country, Mr Moily said the government aims to cut down the span of a litigation, first to three years and eventually bring it further down to a year over the next three years. As part of the proposed judicial reforms , steps are being taken to set up 5,000 new courts to implement speedy justice in the next three-four years.

���From the time of institution of a case to the decision, it should not take more than six months,��� Mr Moily said. Retired judges will be hired to work in three shifts in the courts to clear pending cases.

The Gram Nyayalayas will be put into operation from October 2, Mahatma Gandhi���s birth anniversary. Expressing the hope that half the pending cases may be disposed of through these measures, Mr Moily said there will be a case management methodology. ���Everything will be streamlined. Delivery of judgement will have to be done within a time frame. This will apply to subordinate courts, high courts and the Supreme Court,��� the minister said. Besides training the trial court judges, government will provide them laptops . As the minister put it, there will be a ���multi-pronged approach��� towards ensuring speedy justice and efforts were being made to reduce the number of government litigation as well. The government is the biggest litigant in the higher courts.

���We will come out with guidelines to be followed by officers in taking decisions on whether or not government should file an appeal in the higher courts. Once the criteria for filing of an appeal is evolved, it would be slightly conservative towards moving higher courts and that would lead to a drastic fall in governmental litigation,��� the law minister said.

Mr Moily said he had written to ministers in various ministries and got an encouraging response from them. ���Too many appeals need not be filed. But genuine decisions will be protected,��� he said. The minister will also write to chief ministers to collect statistics on pending cases to reduce the figure of government litigation . ���This will also improve the credibility of the government,��� Mr Moily said.