By IANS
New Delhi : President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Monday asked the judiciary to reduce the huge backlog of pending cases at its various levels at least by 60 percent within five years.
The outgoing president made the suggestion while launching "an ambitious and revolutionary" Rs.8.54 billion e-courts project aimed at computerising the country's entire judiciary right from the trial courts to the Supreme Court.
"The aim of the e-courts project should be to bring down the pendency of the existing 25 million cases in district courts and 3.6 million cases in the high courts by more than 60 percent by 2012," he said.
The Supreme Court must cut down its pendency from 41,000 cases to 10,000, the president said, addressing the function attended by Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan, Law Minister H.R. Bhardwaj, Minister for Communication and IT Minister A. Raja, apex court judges, chief justices and judges of various high courts and trial courts besides hundreds of law students.
President Kalam, in his trademark style, also administered an oath to the law students to "work for reducing the pendency of the cases and spreading the awareness among people about their rights and responsibilities".
While launching the e-court project, president hoped that once it was fully implemented, "the courts would be able to decide civil and criminal cases within two weeks" – which takes decades at present.
In his address, Balakrishnan said that the launch of the e-court project was beginning of a new era and would prove to be a watershed for Indian judiciary.
On the occasion, he also symbolically handed over laptops to four judges of various trial courts. The government later distributed 15,000 laptops to judges of trial courts in the country to mark the launch of the project.
Bhardwaj, terming the project as "ambitious and revolutionary", exhorted the Indian lawyers to stand up to their British counterparts in efficiency and application of technology in the judicial matter".
Referring to his recent visit to Britain, Bhardwaj said: "I saw the lawyers and legal firms working there. Our Indian lawyers are not a match to them."
He said the law ministry has already allocated a sum of Rs.1.87 billion out of an earmarked outlay of Rs.4.42 billion for the first phase of the project, based on the report of the E-Committee on National Policy and Technology in the Indian Judiciary.
The project at the completion of its first phase within two years envisages establishment of computer rooms and judicial service centres in all 2,500 court complexes in the country, besides establishing digital inter-connectivity between all courts from the block level to the Supreme Court, Bhardwaj added.
By the end of its first phase, the project also aims at creating well-structured database of all judicial decisions, he said.
The first phase would also pave the way for establishment of facilities for examination of crime victims and witnesses through video conferencing.
It would also enable the government to do away with the system of transporting the undertrial prisoners from jails to courts to produce them before judges.
The minister hoped to create a National Judicial Data Centre to provide litigation trends in the country by the end of the first phase.
He said that the second phase of the project would be completed in the next two years following which it would be possible to provide information and communication technology (ICT) coverage of judicial processes from filing to execution level and also of all administrative activities.
The third and final phase, which would be implemented in the year after the second phase, will lead to the creation of information gateways between courts and public agencies and departments.