By IANS,
New Delhi : The Delhi Legal Service Authority’s (DLSA) initiative to dispose of nearly 100,000 cases of bad cheques and loan-related disputes received a mixed response from the litigants. Nearly 12,000 cases were successfully negotiated Sunday, officials said. The entire exercise, held in association with the ICCI bank, was paperless.
“We have received pretty good response from litigants and as initial data indicates we have been able to dispose of more than 12,000 cases so far and are expecting the number to increase after collecting data from all the five district courts where more than 100 courts were functioning in the capital,” Sanjay Sharma, Project Officer of the DLSA, told IANS.
Thousands of credit card defaulters of the ICICI Bank settled their long-pending cases and recovery suits at a series of paperless Lok Adalat. All proceedings were conducted online. The verdict of the case was not binding on the litigants.
Supreme Court Justice Arijit Pasayat inaugurated the Lok Adalats at the Patiala House courts premises in the presence of Delhi High Court Chief Justice Ajit Prakash Shah.
“My case was settled within half an hour. I was waiting to get a no-objection certificate from the bank for the past five years but failed to do so. But today everything was materialised after I paid some outstanding amount and bank representative has promised me that I will get the certificate at the earliest,” said Pritam Gandhi, a senior citizen who visited Patiala House complex.
But for some the Lok Adalat was not a good experience.
“I had taken a loan from the bank for Rs.500,000 two years back and the bank had then asked me to pay a monthly instalment of Rs.13,000. But today I realised that for the past few months bank was charging me Rs.16,000 and the judicial officer asked me to make the payment as directed. It’s unfair and I will move court,” said Bhupendra Gupta, a resident of Ghaziabad, at Patiala House court.
“We had expected the cases to take less time to settle. But it took more than half an hour to settle a case, so the rate of disposal was on the lower side,” Sharma said.