1 research outputs found
Estimating Time to Clear Pendency of Cases in High Courts in India using Linear Regression
Indian Judiciary is suffering from burden of millions of cases that are lying
pending in its courts at all the levels. The High Court National Judicial Data
Grid (HC-NJDG) indexes all the cases pending in the high courts and publishes
the data publicly. In this paper, we analyze the data that we have collected
from the HC-NJDG portal on 229 randomly chosen days between August 31, 2017 to
March 22, 2020, including these dates. Thus, the data analyzed in the paper
spans a period of more than two and a half years. We show that: 1) the pending
cases in most of the high courts is increasing linearly with time. 2) the case
load on judges in various high courts is very unevenly distributed, making
judges of some high courts hundred times more loaded than others. 3) for some
high courts it may take even a hundred years to clear the pendency cases if
proper measures are not taken.
We also suggest some policy changes that may help clear the pendency within a
fixed time of either five or fifteen years. Finally, we find that the rate of
institution of cases in high courts can be easily handled by the current
sanctioned strength. However, extra judges are needed only to clear earlier
backlogs.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, JURISIN 2022. arXiv admin note: text overlap
with arXiv:2307.1061