Analyzing HC-NJDG Data to Understand the Pendency in High Courts in India

Indian Judiciary is suffering from burden of millions of cases that are lying pending in its courts at all the levels. In this paper, we analyze the data that we have collected on the pendency of 24 high courts in the Republic of India as they were made available on High Court NJDG (HC-NJDG). We collected data on 73 days beginning August 31, 2017 to December 26, 2018, including these days. Thus, the data collected by us spans a period of almost sixteen months. We have analyzed various statistics available on the NJDG portal for High Courts, including but not limited to the number of judges in each high court, the number of cases pending in each high court, cases that have been pending for more than 10 years, cases filed, listed and disposed, cases filed by women and senior citizens, etc. Our results show that: 1) statistics as important as the number of judges in high courts have serious errors on NJDG (Fig. 1, 2, 10, 11, Table V). 2) pending cases in most of the high courts are increasing rather than decreasing (Fig. 3, 13). 3) regular update of HC-NJDG is required for it to be useful. Data related to some high courts is not being updated regularly or is updated erroneously on the portal (Fig. 14). 4) there is a huge difference in terms of average load of cases on judges of different high courts (Fig. 6). 5) if all the high courts operate at their approved strength of judges, then for most of the high courts pendency can be nullified within 20 years from now (Fig. 21, 22). 6) the pending cases filed by women and senior citizens are disproportionately low, they together constitute less than 10% of the total pending cases (Fig. 23 - 27) 7) a better scheduling process for preparing causelists in courts can help reducing the number of pending cases in the High Courts (Fig. 29). 8) some statistics are not well defined (Fig. 31).Comment: 25 pages, 31 figures, presented at Law Via Internet Conference, 201

e-Courts Project: A Giant Leap by Indian Judiciary

This paper enumerates the efforts made by the Supreme Court of India and proposes a road map of how the existing Information and Communication Tech- nology (ICT) can help Indian judiciary to evolve as more technology driven with increased transparency. The main drive behind the efforts made by the Supreme Court is through e-Courts project. The Government of India has unleashed huge amount of funds to enhance the rate of justice and reduce the piling up of huge number of cases in the courts in India. Various steps have been taken to utilize the power of the Internet to ease the life of the litigant and all the other stakeholders in the process. The efforts are specially targeted to help the poor. The e-Courts project has led to scanning, digitization and digital preservation of case records, enabling video-conferencing for courts and jails, etc. A major outcome of the e- Courts project is the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG). It provides an online, real time information on around 25 million pending cases in Indian courts are various levels. This paper also provides insights in the potential of ICT to be able to go far beyond than what is proposed in the e-Courts project. The e-Courts project has mainly provided a platform for the consolidation of the ICT infrastructure in the courts. In order to be able to use all this computing machinery efficiently, more services, beyond as envisaged in the e-Courts project have to be developed

Contributions to the solution of the energy efficient file distribution problem

It has been realized that energy; one of the key requirements for modern human civilization, must be used efficiently for the civilization to be sustainable. The Information and Communications Technology (ICI) sector is no exception. It has been shown through research that ICT is consuming energy comparable to the aviation sector and is still increasing rapidly. In order to address this issue, many energy efficient approaches applicable to ICT sector have been proposed in the literature. In this Thesis, we pick one of the most ubiquitous task in ICT, file distribution and concentrate on finding ways of transferring a file from one server to many hosts in the most energy efficient manner. We study the problem for one server and many host problem but our algorithms can be applied to many general scenarios inducing P2P file distri­bution, replication of content in a doud, synchronization of caches in content distribution networks, downloading software updates to millions of PCs worldwide, and many more applications w here the data disseminated does not have to be consumed instantaneous y; for example, in video streaming. We study the problem for one server and many hosts but our algorithms can be applied to more general scenarios inducing P2P file distribution, replication of content in a doud, synchronization of caches in content distribution networks, downloading soft­ware updates to millions of PCs worldwide, We assume that the time is slotted and that the file is transferred in units of data called blocks. Each host can have arbitrary power consumption, upload and download capacities. To begin with, we prove that the prob­lem of energy efficient file distribution is NP-complete. In order to solve the problem optimally; we assume additional constraints and impose that all the hosts involved in the file transfer should have same upload and download capacity. Moreover; we also assume that the upload and download capacities are such that they are integral multi­ples of each other, which is typically the case. Under these conditions, we prove lower bounds on energy and design algorithms for file distribution that achieve the calculated lower bounds. Our algorithms minimize the amount of time a host has to be on to down­load and/ or upload in the distribution process. Apart from being theoretically sound, we also evaluate our model by extending our analysis through extensive numerical evaluation to compare the proposed algorithms with the already existing schemes of transfers. Our algorithms show promising improvement over not just the traditional energy agnostic approaches but also over the schemes designed for energy efficient file distribution. It has been shown that our algorithms are at least 50% more energy efficient than any of the proposals compared with. We advance our numerical analysis to relax the constraints in the theoretical analysis and conclude that our algorithms are also applicable in scenarios in which the comput­ing and networking hardware is energy efficient. Our algorithms can exploit the power proportionality of the devices. No efficiency comes without a cost. In this case, we pay the cost in terms of the tight synchronization that our algorithms require. However, we argue that such a tight syn­chronization at each slot level is possible in today's Internet particularly if the algorithms are applied to the hosts inside a corporation in which all the hosts and network are controlled by a central entity. For example, servers of a cloud, content distribution network, software updates inside a corporation, etc.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ingeniería TelemáticaPresidente: Fidel Cacheda Seijo.- Secretario: María Carmen Guerrero López.- Vocal: Guillermo Agustín Ibáñez Fernánde

Towards a Collision-Free WLAN: Dynamic Parameter Adjustment in CSMA/E2CA

Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Enhanced Collision Avoidance (CSMA/ECA) is a distributed MAC protocol that allows collision-free access to the medium in WLAN. The only difference between CSMA/ECA and the well-known CSMA/CA is that the former uses a deterministic backoff after successful transmissions. Collision-free operation is reached after a transient state during which some collisions may occur. This article shows that the duration of the transient state can be shortened by appropriately setting the contention parameters. Standard absorbing Markov Chain theory can be used to describe the behaviour of the system in the transient state and to predict the expected number of slots to reach the collision-free operation. The article also introduces CSMA/E2CA, in which a deterministic backoff is used two consecutive times after a successful transmission. CSMA/E2CA converges quicker to collision-free operation and delivers higher performance than CSMA/CA in harsh wireless scenarios with high frame error rates. To achieve collision-free operations when the number of contenders is large, it may be necessary to dynamically adjust the contention parameter. The last part of the article suggests an approach for such parameter adjustment which is validated by simulation results

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

Energy-optimal collaborative file distribution in wired networks

The impact of the ICT sector in worldwide power consumption is an increasing concern, motivating the research community to devote an important effort to define novel energy efficient networking solutions. Despite file distribution is responsible for a major portion of the current Internet traffic, little effort has been dedicated to address the issue of its energy efficiency so far. Most of the previous literature focuses on optimizing the download time of file distribution schemes (e.g. centralized server-based or distributed peer-to-peer solutions) while it is yet unclear how to optimize file distribution schemes from the point of view of energy consumed. In this paper, we present a general modelling framework to analyze the energy consumption of file distribution systems. First, we show that the general problem of minimizing energy consumption in file distribution is NP-hard. Then, for restricted versions of the problem, we establish theoretical bounds to minimal energy consumption. Furthermore, we define a set of optimal algorithms for a variety of system settings, which exploit the service capabilities of hosts in a P2P fashion. We show that our schemes are capable of reducing at least 50 % of the energy consumed by traditional (yet largely used) centralized distribution schemes even when considering effects such as network congestion and heterogeneous access speed across nodes.Supported in part by Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad grant TEC2014- 55713-R, the DRONEXT project (TEC2014-58964-C2-1-R), Regional Government of Madrid (CM) grant Cloud4BigData (S2013/ICE-2894, co- funded by FSE & FEDER), and BRADE Project (P2013/ICE-2958), NSF of China grant 61520106005, and European Commission H2020 grants ReCred and NOTRE