Shorter breaks, more work

Justice to be meaningful must be delivered within a time frame that makes sense during the lifetime of a litigant. Denial of ‘timely justice’ amounts to denial of ‘justice’ itself. The two are integral to each other. 

Timely disposal of cases is essential to maintaining the rule of law and providing access to justice, which is a guaranteed fundamental right. 

Official figures of pending cases show that the biggest challenge to the Indian state in the 21st century is timely justice. If timely justice is not made available by the state to its citizens, human and economic development is reand disputed contracts, properties and securities lie frozen in the courts for years. It mocks the constitutional right to property and human right to dignity. 

The rule of law, another judicially declared component of the basic structure, too stands dishonoured. The credibility of constitutional governance and a constitutional state gets steadily eroded. 

Expectations from the current Chief Justice of India is high because he was among the four justices who declared at an unprecedented press conference (on January 2018) cautioning  that ‘democracy is in danger’.   

Soon after joining the highest judicial, Justice Ranjan Gogoi passed an order that judges of high courts and subordinate courts must not take leave on working days, except in an emergency.

Surprisingly, this direction did not apply to the apex court, which ideally should have been the case. As a convention, the Supreme Court sits usually for 176-190 working days in a year (high court 210 days and trial courts, 245 days a year) with the remaining half-a-year as vacation/holidays. 

This includes roughly 104 Saturdays and Sundays, nearly one-and-a-half months of summer vacation, a fortnight of winter vacation, besides several other offs, ranging from a day to a week. 

And all this in the backdrop of a huge backlog of cases. Justice Gogoi’s tenure was followed by a week of Dussehra vacation (October 15 to October 20), a week of Diwali break (from November 5 to November 10) and beginning December 17, the Supreme Court had the unusual fortnight-long winter break till January 1, 2019! 

In the middle of some important cases began the long customary summer vacation (May 13, 2019 to June 30, 2019). These vacations distract the entire impetus of judicial work.

In addition to these long holidays and vacations, the Supreme Court Judges (Salaries and Conditions of Service) Act, 1958, provides individual judges their own quota of earned/casual/medical leaves. 

In addition, it would be difficult to deny a judge these entitled leaves if she/he is willing to avail it on a working day. The limited number of working hours in the Supreme Court and high courts even in these restricted days, is double trouble. While eight hours a day and 48 hours a week constitute a normal working period, our judges generally work from 10.30 am to 4.00 pm with an hour of lunch break. These working hours are further marred on Mondays and Fridays of every week on account of it being miscellaneous day. 

As per standard practice – well known in public domain – most judges call it a day before lunch break on both these days. Effectively, it results into four or four-and-a-half hours a day and 20/22.5 hours a week that most judges work. 

Insufficient judicial manpower working four hours per day in the course of 190 days a year, cannot guarantee timely disposal of new inflow of cases with already pending old cases.

While reproducing excerpts of American judgments in their decisions, our judges may find it impressive that despite relatively less workload, the Supreme Court of the United States does not have an annual vacation and gets only ten holidays in a year. Although the hearing sittings are limited to a few months, during the rest of the year, the judges are ‘at work’, reading, researching and holding conferences on the cases before them. 

During the remaining few months that are available to pronounce judgments, they effectively dispose of entire dockets of cases. 

If the Chief Justice wants to end this vicious cycle of arrears and delays, then he should first shorten the long vacations and holidays routinely enjoyed by judges of the Supreme Court. Such extensive vacation and holidays are outdated in terms of its relevance, as well as the need.

The Law Commission of India had suggested that vacations be shortened by at least 10 to 15 days and working hours of the court extended by at least half an hour. 

If courts cannot function all year round, giving individual judges the choice of holidays and vacations, as proposed by the then Chief Justice in 2014, then shortening of holidays/vacation and increasing working hours seem to be a more plausible initiative in this direction.

Besides, the entire question of ensuring timely justice has to begin from evidence-based pendency, which turns into arrears. The question is why should pendency be allowed to fester for it to become an arrear? As usual, prevention is better than cure. If analysis is started at the pendency stage itself, then the causes can be pin-pointed and timely action taken by the high court concerned before matters get out of hand to fructify as arrears. 

The possible solution for pendency and arrears could be case management, court management, witness management, hearings management, and document management, along with the deployment of sufficient judicial manpower. How would the Chief Justice address this bottleneck in his remaining months will test the vitality of his distinction from his predecessors. 

The author is registrar, National Law University, Cuttack