Thursday, January 6, 2011

Snippets: Law Minister Moots ‘National Litigation Policy’

30 million/3 crore- This is the number of cases pending before Indian Courts, with a few cases languishing for close to a decade and a half. Is there a solution in sight? Probably (Probably roughly translates to “Sambhaavna” in Hindi, which is THE WORD that the Indian Railways and other Indian Govt. Departments swear by...)

The Union Law Minister, Mr.Veerappa Moily, has mooted the idea of a ‘comprehensive National Litigation Policy’ which envisages the restriction of the period of litigation to 3 years (Where are the Judges to dispose these cases? New ‘Benches’ have been constituted, but quite a few ‘Benches’ remain vacant or atleast sparsely occupied...)

One of the objectives of the policy is to reduce government litigation, which forms bulk of the pending cases. Also in the offing is the Right to Justice Bill (shouldn’t we first try and pass the Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill, 2010 and the Judges Assets Bill? Because if the faith in the Judiciary takes a beating, which citizen would want to exercise his right to justice?).

Lets be cautiously optimistic about the National Litigation Policy seeing the light of the day in the near future...

Food for thought: Should lawyers be optimistic at all about this policy?! ;-) 

(Image Source: www.cartoonstock.com)

2 comments:

  1. The policy says "advocates found to be conducting arbitrations lethargically and inefficiently must not only be removed from the conduct of such cases but also not briefed in future arbitrations". There is nothing in the policy about how inefficient government officials are. They take ages to gather documents and revert with instructions!

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  2. Lol! Thanks Adithya for pointing that out. I guess lawyers have always been easy targets; merely because we were blackcoats, what we do is always seen through a tinted prism...occupational hazards I guess.

    Bests,
    Sai.

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