The story so far: The judicial system in India is under tremendous pressure. As of May 2022, over 4.7 crore cases are pending in courts across different levels of the judiciary. Of them, 87.4% are pending in subordinate courts, 12.4% in High Courts, while nearly 1,82,000 cases have been pending for over 30 years. Amid the rising trend of litigation, more people and organisations are approaching courts. This spike, however, is not reflected in the number of judges available to hear these cases. Inadequate infrastructure has resulted in overburdened courts, which in turn has led to a massive backlog of cases.
Chief Justice of India (CJI) N. V. Ramana’s recent remarks on pendency and vacancies in the judiciary at a joint conference of CMs and High Court Chief Justices have brought the focus back on the chronic problem of shortage of judges. Speaking at the event, the Chief Justice underlined the need to improve the judge-to-population ratio to reduce the workload of judges who he said are already disposing of an “unimaginable” number of cases. “Unless the foundation is strong, the structure cannot be sustained,” the CJI said and called for an urgent resolution of the issue of unfilled vacancies in the judicial system.
