Not long ago, even after 1991, there was a time when dispute resolution data were only available with a time-lag of around seven years. Data paucity led to strange figures floating around. One of these was the 324-year figure. If there were no new cases and present rates of disposal continued, it would take 324 years to clear the backlog. This was an all-India back-of-the-envelope kind of number, and simply untrue. However, 324 years was catchy enough for this to be widely disseminated. Courtesy the Supreme Court’s “Court News”, the time-lag is now less.

However, one should be pedantic first. The terms pendency, arrears, delay and backlog are used synonymously, though there is a difference. Pendency means total number of cases in courts and it is worth remembering court-based data don’t capture cases clogged in quasi-judicial forums like tribunals. It is possible to argue high pendency indicates faith in the judicial system. Recently, the National Judicial Academy (NJA) put together some inter-state correlations. These show a neat positive correlation between institution rates and literacy. Another neat positive correlation exists between institution rates and population density. Per se, high pendency is a good rather than a bad. Arrears are excess of new cases over disposed cases. Arrears contribute to delays, old cases not disposed of.

Backlog is sometimes used in sense of pendency and sometimes in sense of delay. On June 30, pendency in Supreme Court was 52,592. On March 31, pendency in high courts was 4 million — 3.2 million civil, 0.8 million criminal. Of these, almost a million cases were stuck in the Allahabad HC and almost 500,000 in Madras. On March 31, 26.8 million cases were stuck in district and subordinate courts, 7.6 million civil and 19.1 million criminal. At this lower court level, there are 5.2 million cases in UP, 4.1 million in Maharashtra, 2.5 million in West Bengal, 2.2 million in Gujarat.

... contd.