Economic Survey | Achieving economic progress through legal reforms

In April, the Supreme Court acquitted a man sentenced to life imprisonment in a two-decade-old case after it came to its notice that the convict was a juvenile at the time of the crime. By any standard or measurement this delay in the delivery of justice is appalling. The sad truth is this is not a one-off case.

India’s legal system is overburdened and unless there is a detailed analysis of the problem, this backlog will break the back of India’s judicial machinery. By dedicating an entire chapter to legal reforms, the Economic Survey 2018-19 presented by India’s chief economic adviser Krishnamurthy V Subramanian has suggested a simple, yet comprehensive, solution to this.

Legal reforms find their way into an economic survey because of two main reasons: One, a well-oiled judicial system will ensure enforcing of contracts and resolution of disputes in a timely manner and this in turn will further improve India’s Ease of Doing Business rank. In 2018, India’s overall rank improved from 100 in 2017 to 77, however, its rank in Enforcing Contracts improved a paltry one place from 164 (among 190 countries) in 2017 to 163 in 2018. Two, improvement in the legal system will have a direct effect on the social well-being, which can be expected to have a positive impact on the economy.

It is estimated that more than 3.5 crore cases are pending in various courts across India, and the survey suggests a way to clear this backlog — appoint more judges, especially in the district and subordinate courts. What is interesting is the fine slicing that the survey does while suggesting this measure.

The backlog of cases is because the courts are unable to dispose of cases at the rate at which they are instituted — i.e. more cases are filed in a given time period than those that are settled. This is called the case clearance rate (CCR).

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The Economic Survey suggests that to achieve a 100 per cent CCR, 2,279 additional judges be appointed to district and subordinate courts. Similarly, 93 more judges need to be appointed to the high courts and one judge to the Supreme Court. What is more, these new appointments are well within the sanctioned strength.

However, there’s a huge load of pending cases. To clear the backlog in five years’ time, the survey suggests appointing 8,152 judges in district and subordinate courts, 361 in high courts and eight in the Supreme Court.

The survey further zooms in to look at where are the bottlenecks in the process and suggests changes. Since criminal cases form 71.62 per cent of the total case pendency, additional judges must also be proportionately allocated. This is important because the CCR for civil cases is 94.76 per cent while that for criminal cases is 87.41. This means that if the problem is not addressed now, the backlog for criminal cases will further increase.

Subramanian, at a press conference on July 4, stressed on the importance of legal reforms in the Economic Survey, and said that this was the “best investment” for achieving the goal of #Economy@5trillion. It now has to be seen how the government, and the judiciary, will go about achieving this task from here.

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