One of the main pillars of Democracy is the judiciary....unless the Judiciary functions effectively a Democracy does not deliver to its citizens.....
On this the Justice system in India is not functioning well....
Firstly the biggest blot of all is that 76% of the prisoners in our jails are undertrials.....this compares very poorly with the USA where the undertrials percentage is only 22%....
That means a large percentage of people are in jails and tomorrow if they are proved innocent means their liberty is taken away for nothing and they have to bear the stigma of going to jail lifelong....
There are currently 1412 jails in India accounting for about 5.29 lac prisoners....of these there are 176 prisons with over 200% sanctioned occupancy....
On strength the UP jails take the number 1 position with 90,500 inmates. Bihar with 52,800, MP with 44,000, Maharashtra with 40,000, Punjab with 37,000, Haryana with 26,000, West Bengal with 24,000...
As you can see no Southern state is represented in those higher figures ...
In fact in performances across Police, Prisons, Judiciary and Legal aid all the Southern states are ranked at the top....and West Bengal is at the bottom.....
Out of a total of 10 following is how some of the states are ranked...
1. Karnataka. 6.78
2. AP. 6.32
3. Telangana. 6.15
4. Kerala. 6.09
5. Tamilnadu. 5.62
States with least scores
1. West Bengal. 3.63
2. UP. 3.92
3. Uttarakhand. 4.41
4. Jharkhand. 4.78
5. Rajasthan. 4.83
6. Bihar. 4.88
One of the things that is contributing to delayed justice is the shortage of Judges....I have made an analysis of the Supreme Court and High Court Judges on this ...and will come up later regarding the subordinate courts ...
In fact the backlog of appointments is the highest in the High Courts compared to other class of courts ...
The Supreme Court has a sanctioned strength of 34 Judges ...it currently has 33 Judges with just 1 vacancy....
The High Courts together have a sanctioned strength of 1114 Judges of which only 769 are functioning currently leaving a shortage of 345 Judges or 31%....
Actually the position in some of the High Courts is horrible and little wonder justice gets delayed ...
The worst is the Allahabad High Court which has a sanctioned strength of 160 Judges of which only 87 have been appointed leaving a shortage of 73 or a stunning 46%....when the courts are so understaffed it is very difficult to expect justice speedily....
2nd worst surprisingly is the home state of the PM which is industrially very well developed ...the Gujarat High Court has a sanctioned strength of 52 Judges while the functioning Judges are only 29, leaving a gap of 44%...
After them Calcutta and Bihar shortage 38%, Rajasthan, Punjab & Haryana, Odisha and Uttarakhand 36% each....
Pendency in courts rounded off....
Supreme Court. 9,06,000
High Courts. 63,18,000
Subordinate Courts 4,58,00,000
Total pendency 5,30,24,000
So there are a total of 5.30 crore cases pending in our courts ....
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