Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has urged the countrys judiciary to address the massive backlog of pending cases, which he says is the biggest in the world, BBC online reports Monday.
Official figures show that more than 30 million cases are pending in Indian courts – some since 1950. The backlog has been blamed on the number of vacancies for judges and on archaic laws.
Earlier this year, the chief justice of the Indian capitals High Court created a stir when he said it could take up to 466 years to clear the backlog in his court alone.
Mr Singh called for the modernisation of courts and for linking them through a computerised grid. He said that the government was planning to set up more than 5.000 village courts.
– This will bring justice to the doorsteps of the common people who currently feel that getting justice in India is not only time-consuming and costly, but sometimes also an intractable proposition, the prime minister said.
The large backlog of court cases in India has often been blamed on lack of resources. But a report by the Delhi High Court this year argued that inefficiency, corruption, lack of willpower and accountability are all factors that compound the problem.
