Justice delayed

India Justice Report points to low priority in state spending

The India Justice Report (IJR), 2022, published under the aegis of Tata Trusts in collaboration with a group of sectoral experts, has underlined what every Indian has known for decades: That the justice system does not have the capacity to deliver for the average Indian, even less so for the poor or middle class. This is the refrain of the three IJR reports that have been published so far — the first two in 2019 and 2020 —confirming poor spending priorities by state governments and the Centre. The report said the justice system as a whole remained affected by low budgets and India’s per capita spend on free legal aid — for which 80 per cent of the population is eligible — was a meagre Rs 3.87 a year. Except Delhi and Chandigarh, both of which are Union Territories, no Union Territory or state spends more than 1 per cent of its annual outlay on the judiciary.

No surprise, then, that access to justice is minimal: According to the report, India has just 19 judges per million, a backlog of 48 million cases, prisons over-occupied by 130 per cent, and of those languishing there 77 per cent under-trials — the latter in spite of several superior-court rulings ordering states to release long-standing under-trials. No state or Union Territory has its full complement of judges at both high court and district-court level. Surveys by other agencies in recent years have highlighted the frighteningly parlous state of police forces. The IJR 2022 report offers two separate sets of rankings: For 18 large and mid-size states and for seven small states. None of these results can be described as encouraging. For instance, Karnataka, which tops the rankings of the large and medium states, scored 6.38 out of 10. If 10 is taken as a proxy for what surveys traditionally call “distance to frontier”, this is not a satisfactory score for the highest achiever. The disaggregated data shows that the state’s principal improvements have been in prisons, judiciary, and legal aid, three of what the survey describes as the four “pillars of justice” — police being the fourth.

The underperformance in this aspect is across the board. In 2022, Uttar Pradesh, for example, scored 3.78 out of 10. Given the generally sub-par performance of the big states — only three score more than six — it is no surprise that the seven smaller states, including five in the Northeast, are rank underperformers as well. Here, the best performer, Sikkim, scores 5.01 and the rest record scores at four and below. The poor state of the justice system is out of sync with state governments’ aspirations to attract investment from the business community. It is no coincidence that the economically advanced Western world boasts justice systems that, warts and all, work better for ordinary people than India’s. Given the importance ascribed to the Centre’s “ease of living” slogan, improving the four pillars of justice should be a priority.