Justice Delivery System in India: Addressing Delays and Pendency of Cases in Civil Cases

By : Anupama Goel , Somiya Joshi

Page No: 339-366

Abstract
India has an illustrious history of legal system. However, the judicial and legal system is currently plagued due to huge amount of pendency of cases of civil and criminal nature in the courts at all levels and there are various reasons for this mounting pendency of cases. There have been numerous efforts to address the issue and to remove the backlog of cases and secure expeditious delivery of justice. Besides analysing the status of pendency of cases in civil matters, the existing mechanism for civil judicial system, and the issues/ challenges in this system, the present paper discusses the initiatives already adopted to resolve the problem. However, the fact that there has not been appreciable improvement in the situation with the result that the litigants have been languishing in courts waiting for justice for years together necessitates that the issue ought to be addressed from a different perspective and present paper is an endeavour in that direction. This paper attempts to explore how some of the tenets of ancient judicial system could be potentially used to address the issue.

Authors :
Anupama Goel: Professor of Law, National Law University of Delhi, Dwarka, New Delhi.
Somiya Joshi: Research Associate (ICSSR Project), National Law University of Delhi, Dwarka, New Delhi.