SC drive to eliminate cases older than five years reaches dead end

NEW DELHI: Former CJI S H Kapadia’s resolve to institutionalise National Court Management Systems primarily to eliminate cases older than five years to counter the monstrous pendency has fizzled out as NCMS appears to have become a forgotten chapter.
After consulting the then law minister, the Supreme Court headed by the then CJI Kapadia had on May 2, 2012 issued an order saying, “Under overall control of the CJI, NCMS for enhancing timely justice is established.”
NCMS had six main elements to systematically enhance quality and responsiveness of justice.But the primary focus was “to make the judicial system ‘five plus free’, that is free of cases more than five years old”. The first task of NCMS was to devise a National Framework of Court Excellence that would set measurable performance standards for courts to address issues relating to quality, responsiveness and timeliness of justice.
It envisaged a system of monitoring and enhancing performance parameters of courts and judges. NCMS intended to put in place a case management system to make the judicial process more user friendly. It was to provide acommon national platform for recording and maintaining judicial statistics.
The lofty objectives of ex-CJI Kapadia appear to have been completely lost in the next four-and-a-half years. Justice Kapadia was succeeded by Justices Altamas Kabir, P Sathasivam, R M Lodha, H L Dattu and T S Thakur. TOIspoke to some of the retired CJIs who succeeded Justice Kapadia. None appeared to know much as to where implementation of NCMS stood during their tenure.
TOI also contacted SC authorities, who could only show what was on the court’s website. The website contains information about NCMS and three-year-old reports by three HC judges on various aspects. The authorities could not throw light on the present status of NCMS.
The order issued on May 2, 2012 by then secretary general A I S Cheema said, “A comprehensive implementation plan for NCMS shall be prepared within two months of establishment for consideration and approval of the Chief Justice of India. The implementation plan shall entail not only how NCMS will be established but how it will be institutionalised and sustained. It will identify all resource requirements for the same.” The utter neglect of NCMS was complete as the annual reports of the SC for the years 2014-15 and 2015-16, which are posted on its website, do not even mention the scheme.
Instead, CJI Thakur set up an altogether new mechanism — Centre for Research and Planning (CRP) — to “assist the judges and the courts on the basis of issues involving legal research and carry out a study for improvements in the Court Management System for enhancing speedy justice”. In its report, the CRP said in October that there was a shortage of 5,018 court rooms in trial courts as a sanctioned strength of 20,558 trial judges were expected to operate from 15,540 court rooms. CRP said in 1981, the US had ajudge strength of 107 per million people and if that was taken as a benchmark, India would need more than one lakh judges or five times their present strength.