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Nearly 250 years ago, the British East India Company under governor general Warren Hastings started 'Dewani' (civil) and 'Fauzdari' (criminal) court system. The first Law Commission, set up in 1834 under Lord T B Macaulay, did stupendous work towards codification of civil and criminal laws. After the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, the British government acted on the drafts presented by the commission and enacted Civil Procedure Code, 1859; Indian Penal Code , 1860 and Criminal Procedure Code, 1861.

Codification of civil and criminal laws led to a spurt in court-based litigation which stamped out the traditional panchayat system that provided inexpensive justice. By 1920s, India had a population of 11 crore. Yet, courts had started feeling the heat of pendency. The British set up a commission headed by Calcutta HC's Justice Rankin in 1924 to study the problem and recommend ways and means to contain pendency, which was spooking litigants.

In his report in 1925, Justice Rankin said, “Existence of mass arrears takes the heart out of a presiding officer (judicial officer). He can hardly be expected to take long interest in preliminaries, when he knows that the hearing of the evidence and the decision will not be by him but by his successor after his transfer. So long as such arrears exist, there is temptation to which many presiding officers succumb, to hold back the heavier contested suits and devote attention to the lighter ones.”

Nearly a hundred years have passed since. Yet, Justice Rankin's finding holds good for trial judges even today as nearly 19,000 of them face a pendency of 2.74 crore cases. One must not lose sight that they decide over one crore cases annually, the number of fresh cases which gets filed every year. But the pendency monster continues to live and spread its rotund belly to choke access to justice and stifle right to speedy justice.

The first Law Commission in independent India, headed by renowned lawyer M C Setalvad, made a detailed study of the problems ailing the three-tier justice dispensation system and submitted a 1,262-page report in September 1958 to the Centre. It brushed aside demands for radical reforms and suggested elaborate procedural reforms to ease the choke points.

After Emergency, the Law Commission headed by Justice H R Khanna in November 1978 submitted a report suggesting ways and means to secure elimination of delays and arrears in trial courts. At that time, approximately 4,000 trial judges were facing a pendency of 21 lakh cases. This report said the annual disposal rate was equal to the rate of filing of fresh cases and recommended streamlining of procedures to ease the burden.

In 2014, Justice A P Shah-headed Law Commission suggested a novel method to compute the number of trial judges required to erase the backlog and achieve speedy justice in letter and spirit while concluding that “judicial system is unable to deliver timely justice because of huge backlog of cases for which current judge strength is inadequate”.

Till now, Law Commission recommendations and the SC devised mechanisms to speed up the justice delivery system were characteristically a bird's eye view shorn of recognising the difficulties faced by trial judges in dealing with cases at ground level. The revolution in information technology has provided judiciary with the opportunity to adopt a different approach to empower trial judges to deal with pendency effectively.

Two weeks ago, CJI Dipak Misra said, “Law ultimately belongs to litigants and we have to ensure that it reaches them timely and effectively.” Apart from the oft-repeated demand for adequate infrastructure and increase in number of trial judges, he acknowledged that “without comprehensive range of information technology and communication tools, we cannot expect a state-of-the-art judicial infrastructure, which will advance the paradigm of rule of law”.

The solution must necessarily come from those involved with trial courts. A young advocate, Karan Kalia, recently gave a presentation on an artificial intelligence-aided comprehensive software programme for speedy disposal of trial cases to the SC's eCommittee headed by Justice Madan B Lokur.

The software developed by Kalia's team is impressive as it provides relevant case laws to a trial judge instantaneously while identifying its reliability value. It also helps the trial judge note down daily case proceedings, which could be recalled later on at the touch of a button.

Moreover, the software is so designed that the trial judge automatically gets guided to those portions of higher court rulings relevant to the case she is adjudicating, thus, saving precious time that would have been spent in reading lengthy judgments in entirety.

Like Justice Rankin had said, most trial judges today are reluctant to take up lengthy matters because they are sure they would not be able to write the judgment for it. However, through Kalia' system, the judge who succeeds a transferred judge will, at the touch of a button, be able to recall the summary of proceedings that took place earlier, saving him from rummaging through voluminous records.

Only when technology aided innovative measures get implemented at the first tier of justice delivery system will the rhetoric of access to justice and speedy justice become reality.

