Analyzing HC-NJDG Data to Understand the Pendency in High Courts in India

TL;DR

This study analyzes data from Indian High Courts to identify issues in case pendency, data accuracy, and suggests improvements for judicial efficiency and data management.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of HC-NJDG data, highlighting errors, trends, and proposing data and scheduling improvements for reducing case backlog.

Findings

Judicial workload varies significantly across courts.

Many statistics on NJDG are inaccurate or outdated.

Regular data updates and better scheduling can reduce pendency.

Abstract

Indian Judiciary is suffering from burden of millions of cases that are lying pending in its courts at all the levels. In this paper, we analyze the data that we have collected on the pendency of 24 high courts in the Republic of India as they were made available on High Court NJDG (HC-NJDG). We collected data on 73 days beginning August 31, 2017 to December 26, 2018, including these days. Thus, the data collected by us spans a period of almost sixteen months. We have analyzed various statistics available on the NJDG portal for High Courts, including but not limited to the number of judges in each high court, the number of cases pending in each high court, cases that have been pending for more than 10 years, cases filed, listed and disposed, cases filed by women and senior citizens, etc. Our results show that: 1) statistics as important as the number of judges in high courts have serious errors on NJDG (Fig. 1, 2, 10, 11, Table V). 2) pending cases in most of the high courts are increasing rather than decreasing (Fig. 3, 13). 3) regular update of HC-NJDG is required for it to be useful. Data related to some high courts is not being updated regularly or is updated erroneously on the portal (Fig. 14). 4) there is a huge difference in terms of average load of cases on judges of different high courts (Fig. 6). 5) if all the high courts operate at their approved strength of judges, then for most of the high courts pendency can be nullified within 20 years from now (Fig. 21, 22). 6) the pending cases filed by women and senior citizens are disproportionately low, they together constitute less than 10% of the total pending cases (Fig. 23 - 27) 7) a better scheduling process for preparing causelists in courts can help reducing the number of pending cases in the High Courts (Fig. 29). 8) some statistics are not well defined (Fig. 31).