Judicial Impact Assessment :

• Lawmaking is at the heart of the democratic process. The number, the types, and the quality of laws made each year are significant indicators of the health of a democracy. The very  large number of laws  passed in a year, draw attention to thestandard of parliamentary or legislative debate.
• An excessively detailed law on a simple subject, or a terse law on a complex subject, brings to focus, the question of delegation of powers. Too many amending laws demand an examination of the quality of the original parent legislations.
• The lack of adequate data on the working of the judicial system, particularly at the level of subordinate courts, has been a serious impediment in planning and management of judicial reforms. We still do not know the exact reasons for delay or the time taken at various stages of judicial proceedings. What is the cost involved in processing different types of cases and how is it to be calculated? What is the optimum capacity of the system and how judicial time is to be apportioned or evaluated?
• One feature of lawmaking, that is only occasionally a subject of public debate in India is the effect of new laws. Studying the impact of new laws, also known as judicial impact assessment, involves estimating the additional case-load, expenditure, andother burdens that such laws are likely to impose on the judicial system. It is a process whereby the government can anticipate the likely cost of implementing legislation through the courts and help deliver timely justice to litigants.

Why do we need a Judicial Impact Assessment?

• A large number of bills are introduced by the Parliament as well as the state legislatures every year. Between 2009 and 2014, an average of 172 bills were passed per year in both houses of the parliament. Though most of these bills remain pending , these numbers indicate the enthusiasm with which legislators at the centre participate in the lawmaking process.
• Each legislation increases the burden of court. Presently there are 14,000 Judges, this will take another 300 years for the 26 Million Cases to be cleared. This means the waiting time period for people to get justice from the courts will be long. Litigation demand depends on a variety of factors most of which are not factored in the making of laws.

Litigation is increasing due to three processes:

a. Legislative Activity;

b. Judicial Interpretation of laws: For example: Expansion of Doctrine of Sustainable Development by the SC, here inclusion of more and more rights will increase litigation

c. Economic Activity: Economic Development requires more investment on capital and transfer of technology. Here various legislations come into play, Law of Contracts, Labour Law, etc. so this results in the expansion of laws and as a result new laws have emerged viz., Competition Law, Information Technology Law, hence the judiciary has to see that the right laws are being applied.

• Bills tabled in Parliament are expected to be accompanied by three documents – a financial memorandum, a statement of objects and reasons, and a memorandum regarding the delegation of legislative powers.
• Financial memoranda are required to invite particular attention to the clauses involving expenditure, and provide an estimate of the recurring and non-recurring expenditure, if the Bill is passed into law. In practice, however, these financial memoranda serve only as token appendices, providing little insight into the true implications on the exchequer, and no information on the effects on the populace.
• Ultimately, the court is left with little resources to cope with extra cases generated by the  law. Therefore, despite greater disposal of cases each year, the number of pending cases keep on mounting.
• Therefore, realising the structural imbalance in the system, the Supreme Court on the Salem Advocates’ Association Case (2005)gave a direction to the government to make JIA an essential component of financial memorandum of legislative proposals. The government, then appointed a task force to recommend a methodology and infrastructure for institutionalising JIA in the law making process.

Task force on JIA :

The JIA Report suggested  methods to tackle the overloading of work problem in the judiciary.

• The task force said that judicial impact assessments must be carried out scientifically to estimate the additional case-load that any new legislation (introduced in Parliament as well as state legislatures) would place on courts.
• It also recommended that the cost of adjudicating such cases must be estimated and adequate budgetary provisions must be made accordingly.
• It  further proposed an elaborate institutional structure to project such estimates, in the form of “judicial impact offices” located all over the country, modelling it on similar arrangements in the United States.

• The Report explained that estimation must be done beforehand, the addition or work load to be borne by the judiciary due to the new laws.
• The Government of India must make assessment and provide necessary financial support at the bill stage for implementation of central laws on the subjects in the union list or concurrent list.
• Even as the state provides the necessary finance and infrastructure to judiciary for implementing the new rights or offences created by the fresh laws, the task force recommended the centre for establishment of additional courts for implementation of union laws.
• The report has recommended multiple methodologies based on two field studies commissioned by it : a) When legislatures make changes in CPC or Cr.PC, they impact on litigation.
  b) If laws are made or amended creating or extinguishing substantive rights, it impacts the workload of courts.
  c). When rights are interpreted narrowly or liberally by High Courts and the Supreme Court in the course of adjudication, it results in less or more litigation.
• The taskforce has also demanded that budgeting of judiciary should be based on solid database.
• In short, workload is the result of multiple factors, depending on litigants dispositions, legislative and adjudicative actions. To be able to evolve credible, standardised methodologies to estimate the impact of legislation on court workload, it is necessary to haveinput-output details of court production-delivery systems. Laws need to be classified on identifiable attributes and on the average time it takes through different court procedures. 

Conclusion :

• Some experts have criticised the JIA claiming that such assessments are a blunt, ineffective and unnecessary instrument for two reasons: first, reliable estimates of future litigation are impossible to obtain in India, where even basic court statistics are unavailable; and second, the recognition and creation of rights should not be linked to the existence or creation of judicial system capacity.
• Other critics say that inadequate  judge strength and court infrastructure are only a part of the reason why there is docket exclusion. Lack of an effective human rights bar at local levels is a far more important reason, as is the lack of adequate effort to spread awareness of rights and the social and governmental capacity to implement them.
• Some experts have also recommended Judicial Use Assessment (JUA)  instead of JIA, which could measure if people were actually using courts to enforce their rights .
• Although JIA suggests  better planning in setting up of courts with adequate infrastructural facility and paves way for a degree of specialization besides attitudinal changes and values that govern the process of the courts,  an action plan should be developed for each court in the country to ensure that the judicial system is fully used to secure rights as envisaged by the Constitution. Such an approach will expand and value the rights of people rather than allow rights and their enforcement to be constrained by lack of judicial capacity and budgetary resources.

High Courts

·         There are 24 High Courts at the state and union territory level of India.

·         The Madras High Court in Chennai, Bombay High Court in Mumbai, Calcutta High Court in Kolkata and Allahabad High Court in Allahabad are the oldest four High Courts in India.

Tripura High Court        26 March 2013

Manipur High Court       25 March 2013

Meghalaya High Court   23rd March, 2013

According to a study conducted by Bengaluru-based NGO Daksh on 21 high courts in collaboration with Ministry of Law and Justice (India) in March 2016, it was found that average pendency of a case in High courts in India is 3 years.

District court

·         The highest court in each district is that of the District and Sessions Judge.

·         This is the principal court of original civil jurisdiction besides High Court of the State and which derives its jurisdiction in civil matters primarily from the code of civil procedure.

·          The district court is also a court of Sessions when it exercises its jurisdiction on criminal matters under Code of Criminal procedure.

·          The district court is presided over by one District Judge appointed by the state Government.

·         In addition to the district judge there may be number of Additional District Judges and Assistant District Judges depending on the workload. The Additional District Judge and the court presided have equivalent jurisdiction as the District Judge and his district court.

·         However, the district judge has supervisory control over Additional and Assistant District Judges, including decisions on allocation of work among them.

·         The District and Sessions judge is often referred to as "district judge" when he presides over civil matters and "sessions judge" when he presides over criminal matters.

·          Being the highest judge at district level, the District Judge also enjoys the power to manage the state funds allocated for the development of judiciary in the district.

·         The district judge is also called "Metropolitan session judge" when he is presiding over a district court in a city which is designated "Metropolitan area" by the state Government.

·          Other courts subordinated to district court in the Metropolitan area are also referred to with "metropolitan" prefixed to the usual designation.

·         An area is designated a metropolitan area by the concerned state Government if population of the area exceeds one million or more than that.

District Munsiff Court

·         District Munsiff Court (alternate spelling District Munsif Court) is the court of the lowest order handling matters pertaining to civil matters and criminal matters in the district.

·         Usually it is controlled by the District Courts of the respective district.

·          The District Munsif Court is authorised to try matters pertaining to certain pecuniary limits.

·         The State Government notifies the pecuniary limits for the District Munsiff Courts.

·          It is under the charge of a munsiff magistrate/judicial collector.

·         The appeal against these courts lies before the Subordinate Courts which are one rank superior to the District Munsiff Courts but are inferior to the District court.

·         The State Government prescribes the territorial jurisdiction of the District Munsiff Court. The district is further divided into subdivisions; each subdivision has an in-charge tax inspector and Registrar magistrate.

·         The munsiff magistrate is the judge and presiding officer of the District who keep charge of all tax inspectors (tehsildars).

·         Enforcement is of the law of 1982 CrPc.

·         India has about 11 judicial officers per million population as compared to Australia’s 42 and Canada’s 75 ; the United Kingdom has 51 and the United States has 107 per million population.

·         In the Third All India Judges Association case, the Supreme Court felt that the “time has now come for protecting the judicial system” by directing an increase in the judges strength from 13 per million population to 50 judges per million.