CII floats 5-point plan to cut pendency of court cases

New Delhi, April 27 The National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG), launched in 2015 under the e-Courts Mission Mode Project, to track, manage, and reduce case pendency across India's judicial system, holds a vast potential to enhance the country's performance in enforcing contracts, according to a Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) statement issued on Sunday.

NJDG is a publicly accessible portal, providing judicial data on key performance indicators, such as case institution, pendency and disposal across the formal court system in the country. It aims to promote transparency, accessibility and accountability while supporting evidence-based judicial reforms.

India's rapid growth and urbanisation have led to a surge in disputes, overwhelming the capacity of the judicial system. With over 5 crore cases pending across various courts and case disposal rates lagging behind the new admissions in many jurisdictions, urgent reforms are required to address the burgeoning pendency of cases, the statement said.

The NJDG is an important initiative in the direction of reducing pendency by enabling data-driven policy interventions. While the Grid is already immensely useful, it must continue to evolve in its scope, coverage and quality to facilitate an even more effective informed policymaking in the space of the judicial system spread intricately across the length and breadth of the country, CII further stated.

Positioning Grid as a transformative tool for facilitating expeditious dispute resolution, CII has outlined five specific recommendations to enhance its effectiveness.

First, there is a need for introducing a greater degree of specificity in the categorisation of disputes in a manner that links them to their respective statutes and legal provisions. This would help in identifying the most as well as the least invoked statutes, assess average resolution times of specific categories, pinpoint specific delays and learn from the good practices, which all shall eventually help in implementing targeted policy measures for high-volume, time-intensive and obsolete provisions.

Second, NJDG requires a more detailed and standardised case categorisation framework to ensure consistency and comparability in data reporting across courts. For instance, the Delhi High Court classifies cases under about 50 distinct categories (like Intellectual Property Matters, Cybercrimes, Right to Information Act, Company law & allied matters etc.), whereas NJDG reflects a much lesser number of categories (Ike Execution, Commercial cases, Motor accidental claims, Land etc.). A detailed and standardised reporting structure on NJDG would enhance comparability, improve tracking of pendency trends, and facilitate customised policy interventions.

Third, it is to be ensured that all courts of the country report data on NJDG continuously. At present, certain courts do not report case statistics, resulting in an underestimation of pendency in a state. A case in point is Tamil Nadu, which reports only 15 pending commercial cases at the district level on NJDG as against the actual number estimated to be around 5,000.

Fourth, the scope of NJDG needs to be enhanced to capture the time taken at each procedural stage of litigation. While 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. Introducing time-based metrics would enable a more precise analysis of judicial delays and targeted corrective policy actions.

Finally, to foster a competitive spirit among states, NJDG could report real-time automated rankings of states based on the data collected on Grid. Ranking could subsequently be considered at more disaggregated levels, like for commercial and non-commercial cases, separately.

To begin with, the rankings could be considered based on case-clearance rate (ratio of case disposals to case admissions), averaged over completed months for a calendar year, which could be provided retrospectively for the past 5 – 10 years. This would encourage states to streamline their dispute resolution processes, adopt best practices and drive judicial reforms.

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