Concern has been raised for a long time regarding the pending cases in courts across the country and the slow pace of their disposal.
But there does not seem to be any concrete initiative on how to dispose of the pending cases on time.
It is not without reason that the cases that reach the courts sometimes remain pending for decades or the speed of their disposal is extremely slow.
As a result, the plaintiffs and defendants involved wait for years for justice.
Due to this, the concerns of the courts and judges regarding the obstacles coming in the way of justice have also been raised frequently.
Last Friday, the Supreme Court once again said that if the legal process progresses at ‘slow pace’, litigants may become disillusioned with the justice system.
Along with this, the court issued some guidelines to ensure speedy hearing and disposal of old cases. In this sequence, many instructions have also been given to the High Courts.
The burden of cases and the speed of justice in such cases can be gauged from the fact that according to the data of National Judicial Data Grid i.e. NJDG, many cases are waiting for decision in the court for more than fifty years.
Obviously, there would have been cases in which the parties involved might have even died while waiting for justice for so long.
The question is that in such a situation, if a party approaches the court to complain against the injustice done to it, what kind of feelings will arise within it?
This statement of the Supreme Court seems to have been made keeping this sentiment in mind that due to the extremely slow pace of the legal process, litigants may lose faith in the judicial system.
Whereas in any judicial system, people expect that the courts will do justice in case of injustice to them.
Especially among the weaker sections of the society, if they ever get disappointment from the ruling system, then they pin their hopes only on the judicial system. If justice is ensured then the trust of common people in the courts gets strengthened, otherwise frustration increases.
Even this principle is that delay in justice is a kind of injustice. If an aggrieved party would have reached the threshold of the court in a case fifty or sixty-five years ago in the hope of getting justice and his part had just waited for so many years, is it not a question mark on the entire justice system?
To make the path of complexity of justice process a little easier, the structure of tribunals was created as quasi-judicial institutions. But due to large number of vacant posts and other reasons, it did not yield the expected results.
Certainly the Supreme Court has once again underlined the problem of delay in justice, but despite raising concerns over this issue for a long time, why is there no concrete initiative to find a solution to it?
Governments also do not find it necessary to solve the problems ranging from shortage of judges to infrastructure.
With this level of indifference towards providing justice, how can the pace of reducing the burden of cases, hearing them and ensuring justice be accelerated?
