India - peoples' prison

 Justice Report 2019: Where India stands on police, prisons, judiciary and legal aid

Image Courtesy: indialegallive.com

The recently released India Justice Report, 2019 – a comprehensive analysis of individual Indian states and their performance on police, prisons, judiciary and legal aid ranked West Bengal 12^th among the 18 large states surveyed and 4^th for prisons, while finding it at the bottom half of the list in legal aid, judiciary and the police.

The report uses government data to understand the budgets, infrastructure, human resources, workload, diversity and five year trends of police, prisons, judiciary and legal aid, reported The Telegraph India.

Though it is commendable that West Bengal has ranked first in parameters pertaining to improvement in all categories, it is analysed in the report that West Bengal has a vacancy of nearly 50 percent in the judiciary and more than 25 percent posts waiting to be filled for the police staff. Also, the report says that the budgetary allocations for prisons and judiciary have not increased with the corresponding increases in the general state expenditure between 2012 and 2016. If this continues, the upward trend in improvement may witness a slowdown.

With regards to policing, there was a 42 percent vacancy in the number of scheduled caste officers, 55 percent vacancy in scheduled tribe officers and a shocking 82 percent vacancy in Other Backward Classes (OBC) officers. Women accounted for less than 10 percent of the total staff strength and according to experts it would take the state 29 years to get to the number of having 33 percent of women in the workforce.

The state also sees a vacancy of 75 percent and 85 percent among medical staff and medical officers placed in correctional homes respectively.

With regards to judiciary, the increase in number of vacancies in the West Bengal High court and subordinate courts is a cause for worry. It is quite shocking that the state’s per capita spend in judiciary was the lowest in 2015 – 16, even though the population per high court judge was among the highest. However, a statistic that emerged as a silver lining that the Calcutta High Court was among a handful of courts with a case clearance rate of over 100 percent. Also, though 32.1 percent of the ongoing cases in subordinate courts have been pending for five years or more, case clearance rate there is over 90 percent.

With regards to legal aid, the report said that 83 percent of the districts were within the coverage of the district legal services authorities (DLSAs). The DLSAs are the bodies entrusted with providing free legal aid in the districts. The report states that in Bengal, paralegal volunteers who act as the bridge between the people and the legal aid system, are present in the strength of two for every one lakh persons. While Bengal does well on most parameters of this pillar, underutilization of funds from the National Legal Services Authority and the state’s share in legal aid spending seem to have kept it from climbing high in the rankings.

In the same vein, Kerala which was rated best for its prisons and legal aid and fifth for judiciary, it was ranked fifth from the bottom for its police capacity. Till January 2017, only 6.3 percent of Kerala’s police personnel were women. At its current rate of growth, it would take Kerala 30 years to reach the recommended 33% figure of women in the police force.

However, contrary to the claims of the Uttar Pradesh and Bihar governments, the two states have ranked at the bottom at almost every parameter. UP received a score of 2.98 on policing, while Bihar received a score of 3.77 for the same.

With regards to prisons, marked on various factors ranging from overcrowding to budgeting and infrastructure, Bihar stood at number 6 out of 18 states with a score of 5.61 while UP scored 4.42.

On the parameters of judiciary – availability of judges, clearance of cases and the budget spend on judiciary, Bihar fared the worst with a score of 2.41 followed by UP which scored 3.7.

Maharashtra fared the best on all parameters.

However, the numbers that the report shows are far from ideal. They portray the government lackadaisical approach in tackling vacancies and not taking concrete steps to upgrade the outdated legal framework and infrastructure. It also highlights the stark need for gender sensitization to assure that the justice system reflects the diversity that is needed.

It is also imperative that the judiciary itself take stock of pendency in appointments of judges instead of blaming the Centre for not giving attention to collegium recommendations. The Financial Express reported that the bigger problem was with the higher judiciary dragging its feet on appointments. Given it took the government 127 days to run background checks on judges, as the attorney general pointed out in the SC, it is hard to understand why it took the SC 119 days on average to decide on appointments after receiving the recommendations of the various High Court collegia forwarded by the law ministry. Shockingly, in the case of 199 vacancies out of 396 (as on February 1) in the High Courts, the High Court collegia hadn’t even forwarded names; in the case of some High Courts, recommendations had not been received for five years after the vacancies arose!

The India Justice Report 2019 recommends that the states undertake a cost – benefit analysis that justifies the increasing human resources costs against the failure to address crime and judicial delay. It also recommended that the states pay attention to the recruitment of women, religious minorities and the marginalized communities and improve transparency in the justice system with periodic research and collection of data