Analyzing HC-NJDG Data to Understand the Pendency in High Courts in India
[post]
Kshitiz Verma
2018
unpublished
Indian Judiciary is suffering from burden of millions of cases that are lying pending in its courts at all the levels. Hon'ble Supreme Court of India has initiated e-Courts project to deploy Information and Communication Technology in the judiciary so as to efficiently impart justice without compromising on its quality. The National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) is an important outcome of this project that indexes all the cases pending in the courts and publishes the data publicly. The launch of
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... G has also resulted in a jump of 30 ranks in the World Bank's Ease Of Doing Business Report. In this paper, we analyze the data that we have collected on 58 days related to the pendency of 24 high courts in the Republic of India as they were made available on High Court NJDG (HC-NJDG). The days are chosen randomly between August 31, 2017 and August 31, 2018 , including these days. Thus, the data collected by us spans a period of one year. The goal of this paper is three fold:1. To suggest ways to improve the High Court National Judicial Data Grid so that it becomes more accurate and thus more useful to all the stakeholders. 2. To analyze how the status of pending cases and other statistics have evolved during the data collection period of one year. 3. To come up with more objective and more scientific ways of reducing the pending cases in the High Courts in India. We have analyzed various statistics available on the HC-NJDG portal, 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 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 HC-NJDG.2. some statistics are not well defined.3. regular update of HC-NJDG is required for it to be useful. Data related to some high courts is not being updated regularly on the portal.4. a better scheduling process for preparing causelists in courts can help reducing the number of pending cases in the High Courts.We motivate the problem of pendency in detail and emphasize the need of designing efficient algorithms for scheduling cases in High Courts in India so that the number of pending cases in the High Courts reduce at a satisfactory rate.
doi:10.31228/osf.io/xryj7
fatcat:3e6qkiho5ndqleapew54nqiycq