NEW DELHI: A recent study has found that along with long pendency of cases, issues such as judges’ absence, repeated adjournments and courts refusing to simplify processes add to judicial delay. More than 60% of court time is spent on reasons other than court functioning.A study by Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, found that on an average, it took over 122 weeks, or around two-and-a-half years, for a litigant to get a judgment. Only 41% of this time, or 36 weeks, was spent in court functioning, the remaining period was spent in awaiting orders/instructions from the high court (22 weeks) and adjournments for absence of judges because the presiding officer was either busy or on leave or on transfer order (17 weeks).“There is a huge delay due to the processes of court functioning during the trial stage for reasons namely non-attendance of witnesses, non-appearance of lawyers, lengthy oral arguments, arbitrary adjournments and delayed judgments,” the study said.Adjournment for even passing judgment took an average nine weeks, while court holidays and strikes consumed about five weeks. Then there were other causes of delay such as the absence of lawyers of both plaintiff and the defendant and quite often, court entertaining requests for postponement due to delay in producing required information.To understand court processes and re-engineering opportunities to improve court efficiency for justice delivery, the law ministry had last year assigned the study to IIM-Calcutta. Three professors of the institute — R Rajesh Babu, Sumanta Basu and Indranil Bose — analysed 40 randomly picked civil cases of different types from the jurisdiction of 24 South Parganas district court to understand the reasons for delays.On repeated adjournments, the study found that absence of lawyers was often a common factor. “Since advocates have to deal with multiple cases at the same time, they can’t be present everywhere, hence some cases have to be delayed so that pertinent ones can be attended to. Lawyers also continue to take long dates so as to cover the tenure of the current judge (the tenure of a judge is for a period of 2-3 years) and present the case afresh to the new judge,” it said.The IIM professors said, “Judicial delay and the resultant access to justice issues have led to affirm the belief that law is nothing but the convenience of the powerful. Law and the judicial system must work equally for all sections of society, yet it runs parallel between two different sections of society — one for the rich and the resourceful, and the rest with no or limited resources.”Delay reduction programmes, however, needed to be checked at the micro level rather than providing general prescriptions for major causes of delay, they added.To understand the sources of these delays, the study interviewed litigants and lawyers and found that a case usually got only 5-6 dates in a year, which largely contributed to pendency. “In lower courts, a total of 220 working days with huge backlog of cases has been creating frustration and disappointment across all sections of society,” the study said.Delay in judges’ appointments and inadequate court staff were some other reasons contributing to delays.