Judicial Reforms

About

• Judicial reforms are modifications to a country’s legal system, such as the court system, laws, and approaches, to make the justice system more efficient, obvious, and powerful.
• The aim is to ensure that the justice system upholds the guideline of law and gives fair and well timed justice to all citizens.

Need for Judicial Reforms

• The Judiciary is certainly one of three organs of government, the others being the Executive and Legislature. 
• The non-stop evolution of society requires these organs to usually reform and adapt to changing needs. 
• Hence, the requirement for judicial reforms is a dynamic and ongoing process. 
• These reforms also help ensure that the Judiciary is geared up to handle new challenges and hold its effectiveness in promoting equality and justice for all.

Issues in the Indian Judicial System

• Shortage of Judges: There is a shortage of judges in subordinate courts in India, with around 35% of posts remaining unfilled. This results in a bad judge-to-population ratio, as India has only 17 judges in line with million.
• Appointment of Judges: The judges in India are appointed and transferred by the collegium system. The system has been criticized for being opaque in its functioning.
• Pendency of Cases: The hassle of pendency is particularly acute on the lower levels of the judiciary, in which the bulk of cases are filed and where the shortage of judges is most high.
• Poor Condition of Infrastructure: Insufficient price range allocation outcomes in bad infrastructure for the judiciary in India, spending only 0.09% of its GDP on preserving the judicial infrastructure.
• Human Resources: Lack of efficient secretarial and clerical assistance, scarcity of Public Prosecutors, etc., also adds to the problem.
• Lack of gender diversity: For example, there were only 11 women judges at the Supreme Court since its inception, and no women Chief Justices.
• Undertrials: According to the ‘Prison Statistics India’ report posted by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) in 2020, there have been as many as 4,88,511 jail inmates, of whom 76% were undertrials.
• Procedural issues: It consists of delay in provider of summons/notices to accused/defendants/respondents by system servers and police.
• Outdated Procedural legal guidelines: The Code of Civil Procedure 1908, Code of Criminal Procedure 1973, and The Evidence Act 1872 are all old on the subject of the current needs of society. 
• Burden of extrajudicial work: Burdening of Judges with extra-judicial work (like Legal Services) diverts their focus and time from judicial work.

Past reforms in the Indian Judicial system

• National Mission for Justice Delivery and Legal Reforms (2011):  It was launched with the goals of increasing access by reducing delays and arrears in the system and enhancing responsibility by structural changes.
• Development of infrastructure facilities for judiciary(1993-94): As of July 2022, Rs. 9,13.21 crores have been launched as the inception of the Scheme to improve judicial infrastructure.
• Filling up vacant positions in judiciary: From 2014 to 2022, 46 judges had been appointed to the Supreme Court, and 769 new judges had been appointed to the High Courts.
• Alternative Dispute Resolution(ADR): Lok Adalats, Gram Nyayalayas, Online Dispute Resolution, etc., are used to ensure well timed justice. 
• Initiatives to Fast Track Special Type of Cases: Fast track courts are being set up to expedite the justice shipping and lower the pendency of cases involving heinous crimes, senior citizens, women, children, and so on.
• Digital court system: In the digital court system, regular court lawsuits are conducted really by videoconferencing. 
• E-Sewa Kendras: To provide e-submitting services to attorneys and litigants to bridge the digital divide.
• National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG): Under NJDG, attorneys and litigants can access data of cases and orders/judgments. 
• National Service and Tracking of Electronic Processes (NSTEP): It presents generation-enabled strategies for serving and issuing summons.
• Secure, Scalable & Sugamya Website as a Service (S3WAAS) Website: A new divyang-pleasant internet site for e-committee, based on the S3WaaS platform, is to be had in 13 regional languages along with English & Hindi.
• Digital Justice Clock: It is an initiative to showcase important data like case information, pendency, case disposed, etc., of the justice shipping system at the Court.

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