Comment

‘HC sets 15-day deadline for filling up potholes.’That was the headline in most Mumbai newspapers in mid-August. The story went on to say that a division bench of the High Court had directed the BMC,the Thane Municipal Corporation, MMRDA, Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation and the Bombay Port Trust “to inspect all the roads within their jurisdiction and ensure that all potholes are filled by August 30.” The wonder is that most of the potholes were filled by the given date. Three cheers for the High Court.

Yes, we do appreciate that our car ride is less bumpy (at least till the potholes open up again), and if it weren’t for the judiciary we would have had to wait till the monsoon was over before the potholes were filled. That, after all, is what we have had to go through year after year after year. One ruling of the High Court has changed all that.

But while we cheer, we should also look at these chilling statistics. The number of cases pending across the country are one crore 62 lakhs, of which as many as 44 lakhs are before the higher courts. The reason for this is well-known and every Chief Justice has bemoaned the fact that vacancies of presiding officers are not being filled up in time. For example, 15 per cent of higher court seats are vacant and in Maharashtra, a shocking 31 percent of lower court vacancies have not been filled up.

What the Chief Justices have never talked about is the inadequacy of even the sanctioned strength. Which means that even if all the vacancies were filled up, the number of presiding officers in our various courts would be far below the standards of developed countries. Take a look at this table:

Country No. ofjudges
per million people
USA 107.0
Canada 75.2
Australia 57.7
Britain 50.9
India 10.5

The human tendency, when confronted by impossible figures is not to comprehend them. Which is why it is useful to look at some of the facesbehind the numbers. In Kolkata for example, Keshab Pal was 47 when he was forced to quit the CPWD on grounds of a false birth certificate.

His appeals to the judiciary finally bore fruit when the Kolkata high court ruled in his favour and asked the CPWD to give him back pay with interest—for the last 35 years, because that is how long the case has been in the courts. Pal is now 82 years old.

In Mumbai it needed a division bench of the Bombay High Court to overturn the ‘perverse and absurd ruling of the lower court’ (the court’s words). The sessions court had acquitted a builder and his three associates of the alleged murder of a tenant who refused to give up his flat. What is more perverse and absurd (my words) is that the case took 19 years to be resolved during which time the killers roamed free. What, you wonder, happened to the dead man’s family.

Then there’s the heart-wrenching case of a girl who was raped 16 years earlier, the time it took the case to be resolved. The perverse and absurd thing here is that the girl was confined all these years in a destitute home to ‘look after her’ because she was six years old when she was raped. The irony was that her rapist was out on bail all this time.

There is another side of justice’s delays. In many cases the accused languish in jail for years. At the last count, about 200,000 people were behind bars, many of them for longer than the maximum period they would have to spend in jail if they were convicted.

What does all this have to do with potholes? Actually, it has to do with potholes, speed breakers, seat belts, CNG depots, location of abattoirs, release of films, radiation from x-rays, midday meals for school children, celibacy for zoo animals…All these are issues which have troubled our courts and on which the highest courts in our land have spent their time. Should they?

If you look at the nature of these cases, all of them are within the jurisdiction of the executive —either the central or state governments or municipal corporations —and should be left to them, for better or worse, while the judiciary looks after its own mess. Is that too strong a word to use for the massive backlog and the humanmisery that lies behind those figures?

Yes, I did cheer that smoother drive. But I would be happy to suffer the potholes if I knew that the judiciary were concentrating on doing what it is supposed to do.