Over 2 crore cases pending in lower courts: Government data

NEW DELHI: Over two crore cases are pending in the country's lower courts, out of which over 41 per cent are less than two years old while over 10 per cent are pending for over a decade, Law Ministry data says.

As per data available on the National Judicial Data Grid website as on December 31, 2015, there are a total of 2,00,60,998 cases pending across the district courts in the different states.

Out of these, 83,00,462 or 41.38 per cent cases have been pending for less than two years. At the same time, 21,72,411 or 10.83 per cent cases have been pending for over 10 years, a note prepared by the Department of Justice for a high-level meeting on Justice Delivery and Legal Reforms says.

While referring to the data available on NJDG website, the note clarifies that it does not cover all courts across the country, therefore, the Department of Justice periodically collects the data on pendency of cases from the 24 high courts and the Supreme Court.

The data states that 36,30,282 or 18.1 per cent of the cases have been pending for the last five to ten years.

The number of cases pending between 2 and 5 years stands at 59,83,862 or 29.83 per cent of total cases.

Regarding the pending cases, the Department of Justice says that one of the biggest problems facing policy makers in this field is the "lack of any benchmark" to determine when a case should be considered delayed.

"For example, if a case is not disposed of within a year of it being instituted, will it be considered to be delayed? The lack of a clear criterion to determine what constitutes delay poses a hurdle to determine the policy changes needed to address the issue," the note reads.

Usual attempts to reduce pendency include increasing the number of judges or creating additional benches, and while there is no disagreement that the number of judges does need to be increased, this cannot be the only measure to reduce the pendency, it says.

"A linear formula applied across the different states without taking into consideration the actual reasons behind the delay as well the socio-economic factors of the different states is not going to be too effective in reducing pendency," the government feels.

The e-Committee of Supreme Court had launched the National Judicial Data Grid to provide data on cases pending in the district courts across the country.

The data is segregated into civil and criminal cases and further broken down on the basis of the number of years the cases have been pending.