How Can CII’s 5-Point Plan Help Reduce Court Case Pendency?

New Delhi, April 27 (NationPress) The National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG), initiated in 2015 under the e-Courts Mission Mode Project, aims to monitor, manage, and alleviate case backlog within India's legal framework. As stated by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) on Sunday, it possesses significant potential to bolster the nation’s contract enforcement capabilities.

The NJDG serves as a publicly accessible portal that delivers judicial data on crucial performance metrics, including case initiation, backlog, and resolution rates across the country’s formal court systems. Its primary goal is to enhance transparency, accessibility, and accountability while fostering evidence-based judicial reforms.

India’s rapid development and urban growth have resulted in an increase in disputes, overwhelming the judicial system’s capacity. With more than 5 crore cases pending in various courts and case resolution rates trailing behind new filings in several jurisdictions, immediate reforms are necessary to tackle the escalating case backlog, according to the statement.

The NJDG stands as a pivotal initiative for reducing backlogs by enabling data-driven policy interventions. While the Grid has proven to be immensely beneficial, it needs to continually evolve in its scope, coverage, and quality to promote more effective policymaking in the judicial realm that spans across the nation, CII further emphasized.

Positioning the Grid as a transformative asset for swift dispute resolution, CII has proposed five specific recommendations to amplify its effectiveness.

First, there is a necessity for a more detailed categorization of disputes that associates them with their relevant statutes and legal provisions. This would assist in identifying frequently and infrequently invoked statutes, assessing average resolution times for specific categories, identifying delays, and learning from best practices, ultimately aiding in the implementation of targeted policy measures for high-volume, time-consuming, and outdated provisions.

Second, the NJDG requires a comprehensive and standardized case categorization framework to guarantee consistency and comparability in data reporting across different courts. For instance, the Delhi High Court categorizes cases into about 50 distinct classifications (such as Intellectual Property Matters, Cybercrimes, Right to Information Act, and Company law, among others), while the NJDG reflects a much smaller number of categories (like Execution, Commercial cases, Motor accident claims, and Land). A detailed and standardized reporting structure on NJDG would enhance comparability, improve tracking of backlog trends, and facilitate tailored policy interventions.

Third, it is essential that all courts across the country consistently report data on NJDG. Currently, some courts do not provide case statistics, leading to an underrepresentation of case backlogs in certain states. For example, Tamil Nadu reports only 15 pending commercial cases at the district level on NJDG, whereas the actual number is estimated to be around 5,000.

Fourth, the NJDG's scope needs to be expanded to capture the duration taken at each procedural stage of litigation. While the Grid currently tracks stages such as admission, hearing, final arguments, and judgment for pending civil and criminal cases, it does not indicate how long cases remain pending at each of these stages. Integrating time-based metrics would allow a more accurate analysis of judicial delays and targeted corrective actions.

Finally, to cultivate a competitive spirit among states, NJDG could provide real-time automated rankings based on the data collected. These rankings could further be assessed at more detailed levels, such as for commercial and non-commercial cases separately.

Initially, rankings could be based on the case-clearance rate (the ratio of case disposals to case admissions), averaged over completed months for each calendar year, which could be retrospectively provided for the last 5 to 10 years. This would motivate states to streamline their dispute resolution processes, adopt best practices, and drive judicial reforms.