How justice is delayed and denied in India
The Financial Times
September 6, 2007

Asked to rule on a land dispute that has been stuck in the Indian legal system for half a century, the Supreme Court this week finally snapped. Noting that the country's courts had seized up beneath a backlog of millions of cases, many of them decades old, it expressed "serious concern" for the rule of law in India . "People in India are simply disgusted with this state of affairs and are fast losing faith in the judiciary because of the inordinate delay in disposal of cases," the bench, consisting of justices A.K. Mathur and Markandey Katju, said.

For a country that never tires of describing itself as the world's largest democracy, the court's calamitous warning has come none too soon.

Filed in 1957 by a farmer who is long dead, the case droned on across the decades, consuming lawyers and litigants alike. "This scarecrow of a suit has in course of time become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means," the justices said, quoting Dickens' fictional description of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Bleak House. "Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties (to it) without knowing how or why. It drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless."

India 's judicial system has failed to keep up with the accelerating economy. The number of cases pending before the Supreme Court stood at 43,580 in June, up from 19,806 in 1998. There are 3.7m cases lodged in the high courts and 25m in lower courts. The World Bank ranked India 173rd out of 175 countries for contract enforcement last year, ahead only of Bangladesh and Timor-Leste. An employment termination dispute can take 20 years to resolve. It takes on average 3.9 years to enforce a contract, compared with less than 10 months in China . Costs eat 40 per cent of a claim's value.

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Denied access to justice, many Indians rely on extra-judicial remedies. One reason the Naxalite insurgency extends to 165 districts in 14 states, covering close to 40 per cent of the country and affecting 35 per cent of the population, is that the Maoist rebels operate people's courts that dispense something approximating justice. Manmohan Singh , India 's prime minister, has termed Naxalism the "single biggest internal security challenge facing India ". Citigroup this week noted that the Naxal threat had spread from mineral-rich states such as Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand to the outskirts of Bangalore , with an economic impact that could be "far-reaching".

In the 60 years since independence, India has pulled off the extraordinary feat of sustaining a regime of constitutional liberty with vigorous judicial protection of human rights in a large, poor and diverse society. This has been, as the US-based academics Marc Galanter and Jayanth K. Krishnan put it, one of the "epic legal accomplishments of our time". The tragedy is that this achievement is now at risk. As this week's Supreme Court ruling indicates, India 's legal system, often portrayed as one of the country's greatest strengths, is in reality on the verge of turning into one of its greatest handicaps.