CII Floats 5-Point Plan To Cut Cases Pendency

New Delhi: 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.