Supreme Court moots special fund for court infrastructure

The Supreme Court is so frustrated with the government’s indifference to improving infrastructure in courts that it has decided to set up a fund and do it on its own.

The judiciary is loaded with three crore cases, but hundreds of courts in the country do not even have toilets, clean drinking water, fans, chairs or desks.

Courts depend on the government for these things, but any government work typically takes a lot of time. So, the Supreme Court has decided to raise the money from costs imposed on litigants and court fees which usually go to the exchequer and the legal aid services.

With this money, the court will not have to go to the government for something as simple as repairing a leaky roof. The list of things that the Supreme Court wants includes new courtrooms and computerisation of existing ones.

The money for the infrastructure work will be put in a fund known as the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), a panel headed by Chief Justice SH Kapadia, justices Aftab Alam and KS Radhakrishnan said. According to the judges, the idea behind the SPV is to “put less pressure” on the state and central exchequer.

The SPV will allow the judiciary to have its own annual budget and grants will be made to various states in proportion to “revenue” generated during the last fiscal.

“The time has come for the judiciary to raise its own resources to meet expenses on account of judicial infrastructure, which is lacking in several states,” the CJI said.

Broadly, the SPV would be a prototype of another revenue-generating module called the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (Campa) Fund. Last year, Campa gets money from industries which were fined for violating environmental norms or fees from firms that want to set up plants in eco-sensitive areas. Last year, the top court had asked the government to distribute Rs1,300 crore from Campa among states in accordance with the “revenue” generated by them.