Court delays and high pendencies remain high-priority areas on India’s reform agenda. A remarkable development toward judicial reform occurred at the Kerala High Court on 16 August with the inauguration of ‘24×7 ON Courts’. They have been set up in the Kollam district with support from PUCAR—Public Collective for Avoidance and Resolution of Dispute.
This system of ‘Open and Networked Courts’, which builds an IT layer on top of process changes, will go live at the end of September and initially deal with cheque-bouncing cases. The learnings from this experiment will have substantial implications for our justice system, which continues to groan under delays and high pendency 77 years into India’s independence.
What is the system designed to do?
Scholars have pointed to several reasons for delays: a high volume of cases, not enough judges, summons not reaching parties on time, a large number of adjournments, and limited predictability around when the case will be listed and heard. Some of these problems are deep-rooted and have no easy fixes. However, many can be resolved through improved IT systems that streamline court processes.
The 24×7 ON Courts system is designed to offer several facilities – litigants, lawyers and law clerks will get logins to monitor their cases; cases will be filed online, as will all applications for adjournments. A scheduling system will be used for listing matters in court, and a list of tasks will provide stakeholders with information on what is expected of them in terms of the next steps. There will also be full integration with ePost, an Integrated Core Policing System (iCoPS) for summons and warrants, and dashboards for the judge with information on case progression.
Further, it will allow both parties to reschedule hearings ahead of time to avoid adjournments. If a party cannot attend court, it can request to reschedule its hearing. Parties commit to specific dates based on availability before the next hearing. The adoption of this system by the Kerala High Court is an enormous achievement, especially given the general reluctance we have seen from courts to innovate on process reform.
Also read: Indian govt has a physics problem—time travelling to change tax laws will hurt business
Potential gains
What should we expect from the 24×7 ON Court in the Kollam magistrate?
One of the core recommendations for legal reform has been that the judicial function should be separate from the administrative function. In a hospital, the surgeon only performs the surgery; the administrative staff makes decisions about the hospital’s maintenance, staffing, and scheduling. We have yet to achieve this separation of functions in our courts. This may change with the new system. If processes are streamlined, it may free up the judges’ time for more substantive questions.
In any case, any IT system should be an improvement over current functioning. Many existing frictions will be resolved if the system can bring about predictability around hearing schedules, and enable online hearings so that people don’t have to travel long distances. It will also help if the court registry can speak to two parties regarding non-judicial decisions without a hearing, and if lawyers can make submissions asynchronously.
Finally, the system generates data on the various processes in a court. As of today, no one knows precisely how much time a case takes, how many hearings occur before it gets closed, who seeks adjournments, the reasons for requesting adjournments, and where the frictions are. Most analyses have looked at a subset of the data available on High Court websites, which does not give these details. Analysing the functioning of district courts is even more challenging.
The system will ensure that the data is at least collected and maintained. Anecdotally a cheque-bouncing case, if one were to sit in court and count the minutes of airtime, is probably less than two hours but gets dragged two-plus years. This new system will give us a sense of that fragmentation.
It should give the judge a big picture of what is happening in the aggregate and the actual hurdles in certain cases. For example, if the judge can see that a specific party is always asking for adjournments, they can ask why this might be so. The reasons for adjournments will be recorded more clearly, providing a window into the parties’ incentives to resolve the case. When the data is made available to the larger ecosystem, as it should, it will help generate more knowledge on different dimensions of the justice system and its impact on the larger economy.
Wait and watch
Technology is helpful because it helps resolve friction. However, it is not designed to solve the deeper incentive issues that afflict any system. For example, parties often don’t show up or keep seeking adjournments because delay may be in their interest. An IT process does not address the incentive issue directly, but by shining light on a pattern, it may at least bring it to the forefront. Further, an IT system is only as good as the processes it is built on. If the underlying process is cumbersome, then the IT system will make it smoother, but not entirely reform it. There needs to be a constant effort to improve the process design in our courts.
It’s important to be careful of unanticipated effects. The current innovation has been applied to cheque-bouncing cases. If incentives triumph over technology, parties may contract differently to avoid going through a more streamlined process. At an extreme, they may replace post-dated cheques with some other form of collateral. The full impact of the system will only be known over time. This is not to suggest that systems should not be put in place, but only that we must be careful in measuring direct and indirect outcomes stemming from any such intervention.
The 24×7 ON Court is a significant milestone in India’s court reform journey. It is particularly important because it brings about change at a magistrate’s court, which has the maximum pendency and minimum policy attention. Hopefully, this experiment will encourage the Kerala High Court to expand the system to other matters. It will also inspire other High courts to think, from first principles, about their pain points and develop solutions.
Renuka Sane is managing director at TrustBridge, which works on improving the rule of law for better economic outcomes for India. She tweets @resanering. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)