The Inauguration of the Rule of Law Project

The launch of the Rule of Law Project and website by DAKSH at Bhartiya Vidya Bhawan on Saturday, 7 February, 2015, was a gathering of well-wishers, members from the legal community, researchers, and citizens concerned with governance. The Rule of Law Project at DAKSH studies pendency and backlog of cases in the courts in India.

The launch was inaugurated by Professor Rajeev Gowda (Member of Parliament), Mr. S. S. Naganand (Senior Counsel) and Mr. Shri Kumar (ex-DGP of Karnataka and former Commissioner of the Central Vigilance Commission).

The introduction by Mr. Harish Narasappa, co-founder of DAKSH, spoke of how for the group at DAKSH, this endeavour was an effort born of concern with the maintenance of the ideal of rule of law and experience with the legal system. The Rule of Law Project is composed of an interdisciplinary group of social scientists, data analysts, and lawyers, and hopes to bring together a citizen-centred approach to the understanding of the problem of delays in the courts. DAKSH is concerned with the effects of delay in the courts on the common citizen of the country and is producing a database built from publicly available information from the courts themselves. DAKSH has currently collated data from six High Courts: Karnataka, Hyderabad, Delhi, Madras, Gujarat, and Orissa. The project over the next twelve months will cover all 24 High Courts, the Supreme Court, and five randomly selected District Courts, that will be available on the website. Mr. Narasappa spoke of the need to create a scientifically maintained database that would yield a closer and sustainable understanding of the problem of pendency. In addition to the database, DAKSH will also work on a series of human interest stories of the socio - economic effects of judicial delay, in consultation with other members of civil society.

Professor Rajeev Gowda spoke of the extensive work done by DAKSH in the last few years on voters’ perception and the performance of MLAs and MPs, and the value of this work towards creating a deeper understanding of the voters’ needs and responses. He also spoke of the value of linking of DAKSH’s research with newspapers such as The Times of India and Vijay Karnataka, allowing for stimulating debate and discussion in the public domain on what the common citizen hopes for from their elected representatives. In light of this, Professor Gowda spoke of the necessity of the Rule of Law Project that would also allow for debate on systems of governance and the ideal of the rule of law that upholds justice in India. He spoke of how this data based approach to pendency is novel and can have very positive consequences.

Mr. Kishore Mandyam, co - founder of DAKSH, spoke of his interest in the project as arising out of a concern for the common citizen for whom delay in the courts is not only a matter of legal concern but a social one. He analysed the data set produced by DAKSH, spanning two months of data from six High Courts, and revealed that different courts have different systems of data management. He said that it was tantamount that this data on cases that are in process in the legal system be made better available. For example, the High Court of Karnataka had a superbly maintained data base that was user friendly, while other courts did not have very basic information that are important for an understanding of delay, such as the date of institution for different cases. He provided a series of analytics on the numbers of cases in different High Courts, and figures of average pendency and backlogs.

Mr. Naganand spoke of the quality of judges in the Indian legal system, and maintained that he felt that while the data would assist in improving the primary problem of pendency and spur people into action, it was important for DAKSH to expand the breadth of its research. He said a look at the commonly recognised problems of the judiciary would be a necessary addendum to the Rule of Law Project.

Mr. Srikumar spoke of his experiences as DGP and felt that the data would help in increasing visibility of this problem to the public and would push the administration into taking action. He offered his assistance to the project and expressed his sense that it was important to have a sense of the processes that precede the legal system, for example the work of the police, and the life cycles of cases before they arrive in the courts. He expressed solidarity with this project and said that delay needs to be solved by this generation and not spread to the next.

Mr. Narasappa concluded that the DAKSH Rule of Law Project was eager to expand their approach and methodology and looked forward to the coming year in which further data would be released and analytic reports produced, in the public domain. The programme ended with a vote of thanks from Mr. Narasappa urged the legal and social scientific community to lend the team their inputs and support.

The State of Judicial Statistics in India

Guest Post by Aparna Chandra

There is a consensus in popular and expert opinion that the Indian judicial system is facing a crisis. As evidence of the problems with the system, court watchers point to the endemic delays in the system, its inefficient and expensive processes, its hyper-technical nature, its capture by special interests - particularly lawyers, and the exclusion of marginalized and vulnerable groups from access to the judicial system as well as to just outcomes from it. Depending on who is asked, the causes of the crises include incompetent judges, a sluggish judicial administration, ineffective and/or unethical lawyers, conniving litigants, and an unconcerned or conspiratorial state that keeps the system under-resourced and over-burdened so that the judiciary cannot fulfil its objective of bringing about social transformation through law.

To combat the perceived problems with the system, many judicial reform proposals have been initiated or proposed. Much of the reform effort is targeted towards combating delays, including through reducing “pendency” by increasing judicial resources and infrastructure, or diverting cases from the system through increased use of ADR, plea bargaining, creations of tribunals, gram nyayalayas, etc.

However, much of the policy making in the area of judicial reform has been taking place without any systematic study of the actual operation of the judicial system. Instead of research and evidence led policy making, ad hoc and impressionistic accounts of the judicial system and the personal evaluations of the policy makers as to the functioning of the judiciary, have become the basis for judicial reform.

Take for example, the efforts to reduce delays in the judicial process. While there is consensus in policy making circles that cases in the judicial system are severely delayed, we have no benchmarks for when a case can be considered delayed, what types of cases are delayed, to what extent, in which courts, and for what reasons. In the absence of these data, policy makers either create ad hoc benchmarks (e.g., all criminal cases over 2 years are to be considered delayed), or use the pendency of cases as a substitute to demonstrate and estimate the extent of delays in the system. However, pendency only refers to the number of cases that have been instituted but have not been disposed of. A pending case indicates a problem only if the system is unable to clear that case within a particular timeframe. Without a benchmark of when cases of different sorts should be considered delayed, and with no information in the public domain of how old cases in the system actually are, which stages of the process they are stuck in, and for what reason, any delay reduction effort merely devolves into attempts to reduce pendency by efforts to divert cases from the judicial system, to add more judges who can then dispose of more cases and thus reduce pendency, or by incentivising “disposal” of cases by judicial officers. Little effort is made to understand why cases are delayed in the first place, and what steps may be taken to address the issue. This focus on disposal, without addressing bottlenecks and stress points in the process, compromises the ability of the system to deliver quality justice. 

Similarly, policy makers rarely study whether the system is able to meet its justice delivery objectives for litigants across the socio-economic spectrum; and if not, the causes for this failure. In particular, no account exists of the social identity of litigants approaching the courts, the nature of claims being made by them, the kinds of relief being sought, and the system’s ability to deliver timely justice according to law to these various groups. So also, there is little research on the impact of judicial reform efforts, especially diversion mechanisms like plea bargaining, on the ability of the system to deliver justice to the most vulnerable groups.

Even where attempts have been made to engage in research led policy making, the efforts have been hindered by the lack of data, let alone, quality data on the Indian judicial system.  Researchers have had to resort to using “the hodgepodge of data that is either publicly available or that can be acquired from the Supreme Court” [Nicholas Robinson, A Quantitative Analysis of the Indian Supreme Court’s Workload, 10 Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 570 (2013)]. However, apart from broad numbers on institutions, disposals and pendency of cases before courts, very little data about the judicial system is collected and put into the public domain.

Even where data is available (or is made available), poor documentation practices call into question the accuracy of the data provided. The Law Commission, in its 245^th Report for example, lamented on the quality of data provided by High Courts regarding the institution, disposal and pendency of cases, and pointed to instances of prima facie wrong data being provided by High Courts to the Commission for a report being prepared on the directions of the Supreme Court. This indicates that access to reliable data is difficult even within the system itself.

Further, a lack of uniform data collection methods across the country compounds the problem of lack of quality data. Different states count institutions, disposals and pendencies differently. Some include bail, interlocutory applications, committal proceedings and even traffic challans into their calculations. Others do not. Similarly, different states have different practices of categorizing cases. Since local practices vary, understandably some data cannot be computed in a uniform manner and it is no one’s case that diversity should be eschewed and uniformity adopted only for the sake of uniformity. Further, preserving High Court autonomy and administrative control over subordinate courts within their jurisdiction has its own advantages. However, little conversation has taken place in judicial circles on evolving national level uniform data collection practices, to the extent possible, in keeping with the need to be respectful of local diversity and autonomy.

The multiplicity of approaches in data gathering prevents national level analysis of issues plaguing the system, as well as cross-comparisons and experience-sharing across high courts in a methodologically rigorous manner. The almost complete absence of sound data collection practices is most prominent in states where data gathering practices vary from district to district. In such cases, even intra-state consistencies and disparities cannot be properly evaluated.

Of course, consistency in data collection practices is meaningless unless the data is collected in a methodologically sound manner. In many states, for example, Madhya Pradesh, data is primarily gathered for purposes of performance evaluation of judges. Judges are required to dispose of a certain quota of matters per month for which they are awarded “units”. Different types of matters are allotted different units and at the end of month the total number of units completed by a judge is collated. In order to do this calculation, the court staff maintains a record of how many matters were instituted and disposed of by a judge in the previous month. Periodically this information is sent to the High Court which aggregates the data from all the lower courts and thus generates figures regarding the institution, disposal and pendency of cases. However, each matter for which units are awarded does not necessarily represent a “case.” For example, a bail matter has certain units allotted to it. Therefore, the disposal of a bail matter is counted as one disposal in some high courts. Of course, one “case” may see multiple bail applications being instituted and disposed of, without the case itself being disposed of on merits. Therefore, a single case is counted multiple times in some High Courts. It has become common wisdom within legal circles to talk about 3 crore cases pending in the system. The truth of the matter is that we just do not know how many cases are actually pending in the system. As the Law Commission found in its 245^th report, the actual number is likely to be “significantly smaller” than the numbers provided by the courts would suggest.

The judicial system exercises immense public power and is mandated with a vital constitutional responsibilities. However, due to the lack of transparency in the functioning of the system, the absence of a culture of openness and willingness to engage with civil society, academics and other stakeholders, and near absolute lack of quality statistics on the functioning of the system, the judiciary escapes accountability. At the same time serious reform efforts are stymied because of the lack of information about the working of the system. Reform then is based on anecdotal evidence and the experiences, ideologies, worldviews, and proclivities of individual policy makers. Putting in place mechanisms for rigorous data collection and management within the judicial system, and the generation of sound and accurate judicial statistics has to be the first step towards both holding the system to account for its exercise of public power, as well as to reform the system and equip it to fulfil its constitutional obligations. 

[Dr. Aparna Chandra, Assistant Professor and Research Director, Centre for Constitutional Law, Policy and Governance, National Law University, Delhi. This analysis is based on her experience working with the Law Commission of India on its 245^th report, and on field work undertaken in Madhya Pradesh in 2013 on the functioning of the criminal justice system).

A Note on Law in India

A friend recalled something a friend of his had said on hearing how Joseph K, the protagonist of Kafka’s The Trial, waited outside the court not knowing what his crime is: “Why? Didn’t he know anyone inside?!” This anecdote is of course more than an anecdote. 

Law is not a source of paranoia about the loss of freedom in India. Nor is it a primary source of reassurance about why order exists in India. Indeed, law more commonly seems a pliable phenomenon: I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who can get it to work (or not work).  And, people also get law to behave the way it is expected to.  

Our relationship with modern law couldn’t not have been complex.

In the West, the ideals of citizenship – civil, political and social – were got from the state as an outcome of social struggle and revolution that wished to end the arbitrary power of monarchy and the church and put a democracy in place. It has been 200 years since this process began there.

The Indian state, as we know, embraced the constitutional ideals of citizenship without demands for them from below. The last six decades have been a period where these ideals have tried to find anchor in the minds of people. The state has done its bit in this regard. The news media, schools, political parties, and social movements have also contributed to making Indians see themselves as citizens above everything else.  Realities of brute power and vested interests have of course tried to subvert this process.  The diverse religious traditions and moral philosophies of Indian civilization, whose visions of freedom and equality are at odds with those embodied in the constitution have also existed alongside to provide meaning to social existence.  They have held out their own standards of reasonableness and of acceptable and unacceptable conduct.

Gandhi of course doubted the indispensability of lawyers for society and affirmed his faith in negotiating settlements outside the route of litigation.  In his writings on village reconstruction, Tagore had felt that the village communities could manage local disputes without the necessity of the police or the courts.  Gandhi and Tagore represent the continuing attractions of the desire to arrive at settlements outside courts. The ideals of community life that they espoused still matter in public life: the ideal of self-sacrifice, whereby an individual subordinates his or her interest for the sake of the community’s welfare, is very strong.  Or, the ideal of tolerance which lets people overlook faults, small or big, is also key to understand why so many city residents reconcile to live with their neighbours’ bye-law violations or not bother to report a dented bumper to the police.  The pain of navigating the police and the courts can explain these only to an extent.

The stark power realities that let the powerful to use and disregard law as and when they please has not meant a popular cynicism towards law.  Ambedkar and a whole gamut of distinguished political and social activists have attempted to build inspiration towards law as an instrument of social justice and political freedom. Legal activists continue to engage the courts as if vulnerable citizens mattered and gain victories for democracy. And, even if led by considerations by TRPs, media’s vigilante activism towards the legal misconduct of the government machinery, political parties and, on occasion, corporate companies, is high.  Despite the absurdly high rates of pendency, law still holds out a way for the affected.

We will have to start looking closely at how the various imaginations of law, civility, and equality are working around us.  Instead of viewing liberalism as sacrosanct and the other imaginations of law as illiberal and non-modern, a responsible political task will be to see how liberalism can be challenged, enriched and re-imagined by other ideas of equality and freedom.  And keep the future open.

Method to the Madness

Chetan Bhagat clearly had it all wrong. He thought that two states were problematic. What then, would he say of twenty four?

Twenty four states, two thousand five hundred and fifty three unique values, all to be sorted into a 290 x 24 matrix. This was the December that Shiva and I faced. I’m happy to say we are still standing at the end of it all, armed with a notebook full of pertinent observations to boot. Shiva gave you his take on the exercise last week, so to follow up, here I am with my thoughts.To quickly recap, the Rule of Law project (henceforth the ROLP) is collating a database of all the cases pending before the higher judiciary of this country. We seek to make the ROLP database accessible to the legal fraternity, government bodies, independent researchers and most importantly the general public. The database will contain the case numbers of pending cases. As Kavya has mentioned earlier, these unique case numbers are made up of a case type abbreviation, a number and a year.

To give an example, in the case number WP12345/2006, WP stands for Writ Petition, 12345 is the number and 2006 is the year. What’s that you say? That sounds easy enough? Well my friends, that’s merely the tip of the iceberg. Remember that number we mentioned earlier, a certain two thousand five hundred and fifty three? That is the collective number of case types found in the nomenclature systems of twenty four High Courts across India. Not only do we have the abbreviation WP, we have CP and OP, WA and WTC, and every permutation and combination in between.

For us at the ROLP, it was crucial that we created some sort of key or index for these case types. If lawyers themselves did not know case types, corresponding or otherwise, in states where they did not practice, what hope was there for an ordinary Ram who wanted to do some research on our database? It was at this juncture that Kishore uttered those four words, the ones which filled our mails, our thoughts, our talks and at times our dreams for the next three weeks. ‘Case Type Standardization Table’, or as I like to say, the method to the madness.

We got to work at once. The first stumbling block was waiting for us, right by the start sign. There were no readymade list of case types, each set had to be painstakingly listed out from a case status page, available on the website of the respective parent High Court. At the end of two days, with our aggregated table in front of us, Shiva and I were stupefied by the numbers we were dealing with.
Calmness came in the form of Harish, who told us to take it slow and steady. So we started off, choosing Bombay as our reference court (it had the most case types – 289) and splitting the remaining twenty three courts between us. The process we followed was to match each High Court’s set with the Bombay list.  Day one was rather traumatic. Our conversation was filled with exasperated questions ‘How can Bombay not have a Death Reference?’  or ‘Where do I put Contempt Appeal, under contempt cases or appeals?’. However, it did get easier, and we got better.

In a week we knew all the facts off the top of our head, how many case types each High Court had, which court had a specific type of case, which didn’t, we had our own little KBC[1] going on. In a couple of weeks we had finished the process of matching to Bombay, and heaved a sigh of relief. There was still more to come, with what I call ‘un-matchables’, case types that we could not correlate with the Bombay list. So we rounded up all the un-matchables, categorized and matched them amongst each other and added another hundred odd case types to the Bombay list.

There you had it, three hundred and eighty seven case types. They filled in Column ‘A’ of the (in)famous 'Case Type Standardization Table’. We categorized them broadly as part of the exercise, coming up with a hundred categories they could be sorted into. All of a sudden, we were finished.


There is clearly lots to take away from the operation we carried out. It was exhilarating to work on a pioneering effort like this, and to create a key that has not been publicly available before. The flipside was the bewilderment as to why there is no uniformity in the system. To give you an idea, at the Supreme Court level, which is the only place cases from the High Courts can go for appeal and is common to all, there are just twenty nine[2] distinct case types. How does two thousand five hundred magically morph to twenty nine?

The level of variance that we have in case types at the judiciary is confounding. To draw parallels with the other two arms of the government, it would be as if we had vastly inconsistent state rules under a central legislation or varied departments and officers under each state executive.


Perhaps even more perplexing than the variance itself, was the fact that the variance was variant. What I mean by this is that there was:

•  Variance in Type – There were case types that featured on a particular High Court list, that were nowhere to be found on another list. 

• Variance in Form – Writ Petition was not given the same name across lists, nor were its sub categories uniformly named. Like this there were many cases with numerous nicknames and alibis. 

• Variance in Local Flavour – There was a clear local flavour to each list, case types unique to each would show up. For example Bombay had numerous case types dealing with Parsi Cases, and Kerala had a number of Dewaswom Board related case types. 

• Variance in Level of Classification – While the High Courts of Bombay and Jharkhand both had excellent classification, the former list had 289 entries whereas the latter had just 59 entries. So there was huge contrast in the level of detail each High Court showed.

• Duality – There were case types that could clearly fit well into two separate categories/ case types, but were placed under one type as there was no cross referencing between types.

There you have it, our Case Type Standardization Saga. Right now we are four weeks from where we started and have completed our first Case Type Standardization Table, the first of its kind in this sphere. We’ve found a method to the madness, and next up, hope to render the variance invariant. 

[1] Kaun Banega Crorepati – The Indian television game show
[2] http://sc-efiling.nic.in/sc-efiling/helpdemo.pdf . Refer page 24 of the document for a list of case types that are accepted while making e-filings before the Supreme Court of India. 

The Matchmaking Exercise

As a part of the Rule of Law Project, Ramya and I were assigned the task of doing something which had never been done before. 24 High Courts, about 2000 different case types (each case is classified into a particular type by the Court. For example, a case which deals which contempt is usually classified as a contempt petition. There is a high degree of variance in this nomenclature as different High Courts may assign different names/case types). Standardising these case types across the 24 High Courts in India and coming up with one comprehensive list which would cover all the High Courts. Each of the 24 High Courts have a few common case types and several uncommon ones. This exercise looked to make a single table to see, for example, what a Writ Petition would be named across the 24 High Courts*. Seems manageable? Read on and you will see how this task can make understanding Christopher Nolan’s movies seem simpler.

The task began with extracting the different case types from the websites of the respective High Courts. While the popular High Courts, such as Bombay, Delhi, Madras, Karnataka, Gujrat had the expansions of case types, a few others like Andhra Pradesh, Gauhati, Tripura, Meghalaya did not have the expansions readily. The expanded case types are indispensable in such an exercise as a ‘Co. Pet.’ can be read as a Company Petition as well as a Contempt Petition and an ‘Appl.’ and ‘Apl.’ can be read as an application or as an appeal and a ‘Rev.’ can be read as review as well as a revision.  About 80% of the expansions of case types readily available and about 10% were on a scanned page which had been uploaded as a part of the High Court Rules of the respective states. For the rest of the states, such as Jammu and Kashmir which did not have the case types nor the expansions, we had to visit the cause lists (every court lists out cases which to be heard on that particular day) of those High Courts for about a week daily and extract and expand the case types. While most of the High Courts had the expansions of case types readily and some as a part of the rules, High Courts such as Jammu and Kashmir did not feel the need to put them up anywhere.

After the mammoth exercise of finding the different case types of the 24 High Courts, it was time for the real deal. As Bombay had the highest number of case types, it was chosen as the base list with which the case types of other High Courts would be matched. At this point we noticed some expected similarities as well as many glaring differences in the case types. This trailer showed us that the ride was going to be a super bumpy one. Here are a few instances of the vast variance in the case types of various High Courts.

Variance 1: Let’s take something as simple as a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) to start off with. A few courts decided to have them under the case type of Writ Petitions, the others decided to have a special case type for them, named mostly as ‘PIL’. Some High Courts such as the Bombay High Court went a step further and had a ‘Criminal Public Interest Litigation’ case type as well, other than the ‘Public Interest Litigation’ type.

Variance 2: Some courts had a case type for bail application, many others did not even have a separate case type for bails! While Uttarakhand had first, second, third, fourth, fifth and a sixth case type for bail applications.

Variance 3: While only Calcutta and Bombay had a special case type for BIFR (Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction) cases, none others had a special case type for it.

Variance 4: Orissa had 3 specific case types for Matrimonial related matters [MATA-Matrimonial Cases (Appeals), MATCAS-Matrimonial Case (Suits/Petitions), MATREF-Matrimonial Case (References) and MREF-Matrimonial Reference] while many High Courts did not even have a different case type for matrimonial matters. Gujrat had a special case type for petitions under the Christian Marriage Act and Bombay for Parsi Matrimonial Matters, but none of the other courts reflected anything remotely close.

It was heartening to see that there was uniformity in case types relating to Arbitration, Company and Contempt matters. The entire exercise showed us how incoherent the case types of various High Courts are. This exercise lasted a little over 3 weeks, with myriad calls/mails to members of the legal fraternity all over the country and many disturbing dreams while asleep on the intricacies of the high degree of variance.

Matchmaking is hard, isn’t it?

*For convenience, each High Court has been referred to by the name of the state/city mentioned in its actual name.

Ctrl+C and other stories.

In the process of unfurling our research method at The Rule of Law project it has been important to examine what data can help us frame information that can answer the question of what “delay” and "pendency" really means, outside of the anecdotal narratives that get thrown up both in the media and in reports of and by the courts themselves. If we were to generate statistics on the nature of judicial delay, what would we need to do? 

My fellow travellers and guides Harish and Kishore, a few weeks into letting me roam the lands of literature review, came up with an ingenious solution.

Look to the cause list.

I'm fairly certain, after several months of speaking of cause lists with something like obsession, that the lay person in our country will know little or next to nothing about what a cause list is.

A cause list is produced daily by every court in the country, detailing the case number, the litigants, the lawyers, for the reference of those who are in the process of litigation. This is a public document.

The cause lists, however, are a kind of endlessly disappearing archive of information, since they are put up each day for the use of lawyers and litigants, and removed once their use passes. Beyond a certain amount of time (a week, perhaps a fortnight), these lists get taken off the main website.

A cause list is, on some enquiry, a straightforward document: it tells you which case is heard before which judge on what day. In this, it is very valuable, since each case number that is in process in the courts will necessarily show up at some point in a year, during the various stages of life in the courts. As we said in our last post, there are 44,56,232 pending cases in the High Court. The cause lists will ensure that we are able to capture these cases in our data in the coming year.

And most crucially, what we can capture with this information is the case number itself.

The case number is, for example, WP13457/2004. A Writ Petition, a number, and a year.

A typical cause list contains the following:

·  Case Number

·  Date of Hearing

·  Judge

·  Hall Number

·  Court/Bench

·  Advocates for Petitioner

·  Advocates for Respondent

·  Stage

·  (for eg, Orders, Interlocutory Appeals, Preliminary Hearing.)

With each Case Number, we are able to access the following details:

· Date of Institution

· Date of Disposal in Lower Courts

· Case Status

· Causes of Adjournments.

· Number of Times Listed

· Details of what the case is listed for (for eg. Non-compliance of office objections, etc.)

· District of Filing of Case

How were we going to put this information together, everyday, across 24 High Courts of the country?

A woman's best friend in such a situation is really manual data entry. We started our work by spending up to a week copying and pasting each element of the data available in the cause list into an excel sheet: a case number and all its corresponding details.

There is, for example, no standard format for the digitised PDF of the daily cause list that is put up on a High Court's website. It is typically a type-written document, put together by a clerk, scanned and uploaded on to a High Court's website as a PDF. A document that consists of scanned images of text is inherently inaccessible because the content of the document is images, not searchable text. Sometimes, these PDFs are not scanned images but rendered with html; copy and paste a single line of this into an excel sheet and you will be left with a glorious garble that breaks down the tentative coherence in format effected by that judicial clerk who has compiled the cause list that morning.

Each High Court, too, has different formats for the way a cause list is organised. Each daily cause list typically runs into up to 50 pages, ranging between 800 to 2000 cases before a few judges in a day.

I started with three High Courts: Karnataka, Delhi, and Gujarat. In the case of most cause lists, the process of copy and paste was fairly straightforward, since the PDF allowed for it. However, there were those cause lists whose PDF did not allow for an easy cut and paste of information. What I discovered was that while it took me about an hour and a half to put together details of 250 cases into an excel sheet from a PDF from the Karnataka High Court, it took me about two hours to put together merely 20 cases from a cause list of the Gujarat High Court.

It became quite clear from this exercise that this manual data entry would not only be inordinately time consuming, but that it was necessary for us to begin to understand what a large amount of this data collated could show us about possible inferences.

At this stage, we turned to the data entry elves at a small service provider called Data Con Services. Quite close to Toll Gate in North Bangalore, Data Con services is a small house converted into an office space full of cubicles, populated by young men and women typing away and keying in data, row by laborious row. Having spent some time keying in this information myself, I knew that this work involves a mixture of tedium and close attention.

Our data entry elves were able to collate and compile the daily cause list for four High Courts and managed to put together well organised excel sheets for 20 days of cause lists in the span of two months. By the end of November 2014, we had data for 80,000 cases in hand, done all by the force of pure manual labour.

While our team had spent a few months beginning to understand all the possible ways in which we could use the information in a cause list for our research, Kishore had spent his energy understanding the way the courts organised their data on the High Court websites. This proved to be an inordinately useful two-pronged approach, since our team was able to understand the ins and outs of the information even as softwares were being written to make the data available to us.

For example, our team undertook the task of picking a randomised data set from the Karnataka High Court of October 2014, to trace the date of institution for each case number. This involved another week spent with Ctrl+C, that gloriously simple yet tedious function: feeding in a case number into a High Court website, to trace it backwards and see when that case was instituted, and from which lower court it emerged. This process of tracing date of institution helped us understand that a simple case number points towards several layers of important data. 

It was by this time that softwares that defy the imagination of an ordinary sociologist came into force. Kishore had cracked for us a method that parsed all the data on the High Court websites into clean and crystal clear excelsheets: what had taken us a few months to understand, a software broke down in a matter of mere seconds. 

So it turns out that what we had considered virtually impossible, turns out to be possible. Armed as we are with a fast growing database, we will leave you again, to return later with more stories of our methods, of case numbers and case types and our ever growing, never ending relationship with excel sheets. 

“…the case went on for years and years and years”*

Just last week, the mother of all delayed cases – the Disproportionate Assets Case against former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa, under the Prevention of Corruption Act – has come to a head. Jayalalithaa was in the Supreme Court yesterday, which has deemed the necessity of a swift judicial process in the hearing of her appeals. An exclusive Special Bench will be constituted to address her defence, in the Karnataka High Court, with daily hearings scheduled to finish within three months.

The story of Jayalalitha- the 800 kg of silver, the 28 kg of gold and the 750 notorious shoes, has become the stuff of common parlance for what signifies corruption. In nearly two decades, the corrupting figure of Rs. 66.65 crores – crumbs in the broad expanse of corruption in the legislature – has been featured endlessly in the media.

It is, however, a true case of missing the wood for the trees.

An eighteen year old case, this judicial saga has seen a remarkable trajectory that serves to highlight one of the primary ailments of the Indian judiciary: delay.

For us at DAKSH, the question that is far more pressing is, has justice been done by the recent verdict in the Jayalalithaa case? It is true that this is a rare case of a Chief Minister being brought to justice by the judiciary, demonstrating the independence and possibility of the precept of “nobody above the law” encoded into our Constitution. However, is it justice if it takes eighteen years to deliver it?

Earlier this month, Chief Justice of India H.L. Dattu expressed concern over the high numbers of pendency in the Indian courts, as one of the biggest hurdles for the dispensation of justice in the country. On the same day, litigants who have seen 1500-1900 dates in court, formed a human chain to stage a protest outside the Delhi High Court, with the one statement that "We only want justice not delay." Justice A.P. Shah famously remarked in 2011 that it would take the court up to 466 years to clear the backlog in just the Delhi courts.

The problem of pendency -- all cases instituted but not disposed of, regardless of when the case was instituted in the courts -- we have found, is a much studied one, accompanied as it is with a widely held common sense that sees the judiciary as several steps behind its potential in being unable to deliver timely justice. “Justice hurried is justice buried” and “Justice delayed is justice denied”: commonly understood maxims that tell us that the quality of justice is very much dependent on the time taken to deliver it.

DAKSH’s new work, The Rule of Law project , looks at this problem of pendency and backlog in the Indian legal system. As a group of lawyers, sociologist and data analysts, we are excited to bring together a different register of critical energies to understand this problem.

Our first question at the outset of our study has been, what data do we begin to work with? What is pendency, and how do we begin to address it in our research?

We begin our pursuit of this study with a very preliminary and layperson’s perspective of the legal system. The legal system exists to ensure that in case of the violation of this personal freedom, or if a citizen has violated the legal code of our country, justice is meted out in a qualitative manner in accordance with the legal spirit of the country.

While we live in a country with a vast and sprawling network of well-ordered judicial institutions, these systems are densely congested with cases that they are unable to see through in a timely fashion. To put it more simply, while there exists a dynamic and extensive judiciary, the numbers of cases lodged in the system that have not yet seen the light of day, remain an immense challenge to the quality and delivery of justice.

As preliminary leg work for our project, our team has carried out an extensive review of literature to understand why this is the case. What does “delay” in the courts really mean? How do we quantify pendency, and what amount of time is too much, when a case is in process? Can there be a predetermined mandate for how long the resolution of a single case ought to take in a court?

It is with these questions that we have come to understand at DAKSH that a simple number, statistic, or even prescription cannot hold much value in looking at this problem.

We understand from the literature made available by the Supreme Court itself in Court News, that there are 64, 330 cases of pendency in the Supreme Court, 44,56,232 in the High Courts, and 2,68,39,256 in the District and Subordinate Courts, as of 31-12-2012. What do these numbers indicate? If each case in this system has been in the system for only six months since its admission, the number appears less daunting; however, if these cases have been in the system for years, they indicate a wholly different tendency.

So, what is the tendency of pendency? In a country where the judiciary can vary across different states, where the profile of litigants and cultures of litigation differ, what common index can help us understand the difference in what backlogs indicate for different contexts?

In response to various studies that have studied the problem of pendency, DAKSH has undertaken the quantitative task of collating and collecting primary data that is made publicly available by the courts themselves, to allow for further public debate and research that will hopefully be able to throw light on the specificities thrown up by this issue.

It has been seen that it is crucial to produce reliable statistics of the kinds of delay in the various courts in India. Official statistics do exist, but it is not entirely clear what these numbers indicate. More cases are registered in the courts than are resolved, and the movement of disposals in a responsive and qualitative manner will depend, in the future, on a management of pendency within the courts.

Our work at The Rule of Law project is to collect and collate data on the High Courts in the country at an all-Indian level that can be used by researchers, lawyers, even the courts, to study the systems of litigation in our country. As a starting point, The Rule of Law project is collecting primary data from the daily cause list that provides a detailed profile of cases, from different High Courts in the country. Over the course of the coming year, we will be collecting this data for all 24 High Courts and the Supreme Court.

Stay tuned for upcoming blogposts where we will tell you more about our method, which has involved a lot of minute work understanding the courts, and we will present a series of reflections and experiences in collating and organising our data, and the challenges they pose to the study of delays at the court in our country.

*  The blog title is taken from Chief Justice of India H. L. Dattu's comment in the Supreme Court, can be found here: <http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/as-it-happened-a-minutebyminute-account-of-jayalalithaa-bail-hearing/article6510700.ece>