Is number of cases rising as a result of shortage of judges?
One of the main causes of the rise in pending cases in courts is the shortage of judges. The official response from the government states that there are 26,568 sanctioned judges in indian courts overall, of which 34 are sanctioned to sit in the supreme court and 1,114 to sit in the High Court. Aside from this, 25,420 judges are authorized to serve in district and subordinate courts. Nevertheless, 324 of the total number of judge positions remain unfilled, and no judges have been appointed to them.
There are presently 80,344 cases pending before the supreme court, according to data from the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) as of this report. which are divided between 22% criminal cases and 78% civil lawsuits. You might be startled to hear that over 4,000 cases in the supreme Court's backlog have been there for more than ten years.
These numbers show that 37,777 of these cases were resolved even prior to the start of current year. There are 62,859 civil cases outstanding, of which 17,897 made it all the way to the supreme court just a year ago. In addition, there are 17,485 criminal cases, of which 7,222 made it all the way to the supreme court in less than a year. In india, there are just 21 judges for every 10 lakh people, as per the response provided by the rajya sabha legislation. One of the main causes of the backlog of cases in such a scenario is the lack of judges. In comparison to other nations, india has a relatively low judge-to-population ratio.
In this scenario, more judges are required due to the volume of cases that are waiting in the court. In addition, the justices of the supreme court are required to attend both official and informal events, such as conferences, seminars, inaugurations, and the like, which takes up a lot of their time and influences the way cases are heard.
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