Vacancies in district courts

EARLY this month, Law Minister Kiren Rijiju, expressing his concern over case pendency in Indian courts, said the number of pending cases in various courts ‘is about to reach five crore.’ He said while pendency in the Supreme Court and high courts ‘will come down’, ‘infrastructure in the lower courts is a real challenge for me and that is the responsibility of the Central government and the state governments together.’ The challenge is multifarious, but one lacuna that must be addressed at the earliest is the absence of the sanctioned number of judges — Rijiju has told Parliament that 5,850 posts of judge are vacant in various district courts.

As per the latest numbers released by the Law Ministry, subordinate courts currently have 19,192 judges against the sanctioned strength of 25,042. In other words, vacancies across the subordinate courts amount to a staggering 23.3 per cent. The situation is especially dire in Uttar Pradesh, where nearly a third of the 3,638 posts of judge in district courts are vacant. Other high-population states such as Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu fare only slightly better than Uttar Pradesh, and the vacancy rate is alarming in Haryana (39.7%) and Punjab (26%). Early this year, the then Chief Justice of India NV Ramana had said that strengthening the district-level judiciary was the ‘need of the hour’ for it is ‘the backbone of the justice delivery system in the world’s largest democracy.’ There are 766 districts in India and while their sizes and populations vary, on an average, each district is short by 7.6 judges. Since the 2001 Census, the number of districts in India has risen from 593 to 766, and it is imperative to create or upgrade the judicial infrastructure.

As for the vacancies in the district courts, immediate steps must be taken to fill them. Further, the creation of a national judicial service would be a step in the right direction, for appointments could be made through it on an annual basis. Another advantage of such a service is that it would ensure uniformity and quality across courts in India. As Rijiju says, tackling pendency of cases is a huge challenge, and the first step towards doing that would be to fill 23.3% vacant posts of judge in district courts, for over 87% of India’s pending cases are stuck in the subordinate courts.