more-in The Madras High Court Bench here is all set to complete 13 years of its service on July 24. It is a significant achievement for a Bench that had hit national headlines on many occasions by passing orders such as the stay imposed last month on the Centre’s ban on selling cattle for slaughter in animal markets and the interim injunction restraining Central Board of Secondary Education from declaring the results of National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET). However, the stark reality remains that such cases are few and far between. What constitutes the majority are cases filed seeking permission for Aadal Paadal (late night dance performances) or conducting cricket or kabbadi tournaments or for removing encroachments. Pleas for issuance of ration cards, pension and patta (land ownership document) from revenue officials and those seeking directions to the police to register First Information Reports are aplenty. Justice P.N. Prakash, who holds the record of having disposed of the highest number of cases (11,668 main cases and 5,060 sub applications) last year, had himself lamented about the sorry state of affairs. Writing for law journal Current Tamil Nadu Cases, he had expressed his disappointment over a Constitutional authority of the stature of a High Court judge spending valuable time on deciding cases that have very little or absolutely no legal importance at all. “On the expiry of my Madurai Bench tenure, the Registry submitted the statement of disposal of cases for the three months which showed that I had worked for 59 days and disposed of 7,518 cases. It meant, I disposed of 127 cases per day on an average and took 2.56 minutes to dispose every case. I was on cloud nine and wanted to pat myself on my back when my inner voice reminded me that I had not delivered one reportable judgement worth its salt during the period. “So what comprised 7,518 cases? I called for more particulars from the Registry and my spirits stood dampened,” the judge said and pointed out that 364 of them were bail applications, 1,736 anticipatory bail petitions, 248 petitions seeking a direction to the police to ‘not to harass’ the petitioners in connection with criminal cases, 1,127 petitions seeking a direction to register criminal complaints and 218 petitions seeking a direction to file charge sheets in criminal cases. The rest of the cases disposed by the judge included 87 contempt of court applications, 127 petitions to quash First Information Reports, 108 petitions to quash criminal cases pending for trial, 183 petitions to quash cases on the basis of compromise reached between complainants and accused, 95 petitions seeking transfer of investigation from one agency to another or transfer of trial from one court to another and 460 cases seeking permission for Aadal Paadal. “When these sort of litigations clog the system, the cry of the poor and the weak for real justice gets drowned in the cacophony,” the judge pointed out. Not only him, even Chief Justice of India Jagdish Singh Khehar too had expressed serious concern over frivolous litigations while authoring a judgement for a Bench led by Justice K.S. Radhakrishnan (since retired) in Subrato Roy Sahara vs. Union of India on May 6, 2014. “The Indian judicial system is grossly affected with frivolous litigations... At the end of the day, Court time lost is a direct loss to the nation. It is about time that the legislature should evolve ways and means to curtail this unmindful activity. We are sure that an eventual determination, one way or the other, would be in the best interest of this country as also its countrymen,” the Bench had observed. Clogging the system Agreeing that such cases were indeed clogging the system, advocate M. Kannan practising in the High Court Bench here points out that litigant public were being forced to approach the court due to failure of government authorities to discahrge their duties properly. Stating that the jurisdiction of the High Court being invoked even for conducting Aadal Padal programmes and kabbadi tournaments is a matter of concern, he feels that the subject requires a serious study. Before evolving the ways and means to curb frivolous litigation, it is imperative for the government to collect empirical data and study the nature of cases filed as well as the litigants’ psyche than just confining the annual litigation statistics to the number of cases filed in the courts and the number disposed of. In this process, a cue could be taken from The Judicial Statistics Bill, 2004, a private member’s Bill introduced by renowned jurist Fali S. Nariman during his stint as a member of the Rajya Sabha on December 3, 2004. The Bill envisaged constitution of separate judicial statistical authorities for the Supreme Court, High Courts and district courts for collection and publication of judicial statistics and placing them in public domain. The Bill’s salient features included studying the nature of disputes raised before courts, their outcome before the lower courts, their outcome before appellate courts, names of judges who heard them, lawyers who appeared for parties, number of hours taken, adjournments granted, the Acts and the sections under which the cause of action was invoked and so on. “A detailed study of such a nature would go a long way in streamlining the system,” Mr. Kannan hoped.

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