Work pressure -
it’s a much bandied about phrase. While often associated with long hours and
the compulsion to deliver difficult pieces of work in impossibly short
time spans, the specifics of work pressure vary vastly from profession to
profession. For the most part, work pressure stays a nebulous and ominous
force, since quantifying it opens a Pandora’s Box in its own right. How would
you measure work pressure – is it by looking at the number of hours that a
person works in a day, the number of days of leave they get in a month, the
number of pieces of work they have to send out every day or a permutation and
combination of all of these as well as other factors?
Judges represent
one third of the triumvirate of actors that make up the judicial system. In many
ways, they are the constants of the system. Litigants come as their need arises
and lawyers work on case by case basis. Judges however, are in court all day,
every day, listening to disputes, deciding on them and writing judgements. Currently, India has 601 High Court judges.
Add to this number the 25 judges of the Supreme Court and you have 626
representatives in the higher judiciary for a population of 1.252 billion
people. Right away, without trying to quantify anything, those numbers tell you
that High Court judges are facing acute work pressure.
We know that High
Court judges are having difficult days at work, but effecting systemic change
and understanding the root of the problem, means looking at judicial work
pressure from a quantitative perspective. This is where the DAKSH database
comes in. Using the database, we are able to identify and analyse a key
statistic to quantify judge’s work pressure – the average number of hearings
that appear before a judge each day (court wise). Below is a chart that provides
this number for certain High Courts in our database.
To make real
sense of these statistics, we need to take a step back and look at another
number – the daily working hours for a judge. On average, judges spend between
five and five and a half hours a day hearing and deciding cases. That is 300 to
350 minutes. With that figure in mind, take another look at the chart. A quick explanation on the chart- The courts
included have been chosen to represent a range of hearings per day. There are
three categories that have been represented– courts with a low number (Himachal
Pradesh), courts with a medium number (Orissa) and courts with a high number (Patna).
If we do some
basic division, it tells us that most (relatively) relaxed High Court judges in the country
have 15-16 minutes to hear each case that comes before them, while the busiest
judges have about two and a half minutes to hear a case and on average, judges
have approximately five or six minutes to decide the outcome of each hearing!
This alarming
statistic raises serious questions on the fairness of hearings in the courts as all parties may not get an adequate opportunity in each hearing.
Surely, the argument should be that if a case deserves a hearing for a longer length of time, the judge should not make short shrift of it. That said, what is the solution? More judges? Longer working hours? More sequestration of cases - what kinds of cases should be appealable?
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment. The question you raised is the very question we hope to answer. However, with this (preliminary) data we cannot offer solutions
DeleteThe goal is to read this data with other data (such as types of cases judges are hearing) and then implement changes. I suspect it will not be solved by taking any one particular step, but a combination of some steps you suggested above along with others.
Also,along with coming up with solutions, one of our main goals by publishing this piece and others like it, is to widen the scope of the debate on pendency. Currently, the workload of judges is not widely discussed point, though it clearly needs to be.
Excellent article. To respond to the above comment, I believe the solution is more financial (capital) investment in the infrastructure needed to support the rule of law. The problem is affecting transactions where there are no disputes and the economy as a whole. For a fuller explanation of how: http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/tkCfqdl34UPNHdOsAOc9rM/Investing-in-the-right-infrastructure.html
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