DNA Edit: Ranjan Gogoi’s reforms - CJI intends to usher in much-needed changes

By the looks of it, the day of judicial reforms seem to have arrived with the elevation of the new Chief Justice of India (CJI), Ranjan Gogoi.

In the first three landmark cases, which his bench heard - Ayodhya, Rafale and the CBI controversy - interim orders were passed with precision, shorn of verbosity and strictly no-nonsense, putting a premium on the court’s precious time. By the looks of it, it is not merely appearances that the new boss of the country’s apex court has in mind. 

Last week, the CJI opened a window to his thought process when he declared that the “judiciary is in dire need of drastic reforms.” Coming right from the top, the statement assumes a significance of its own. The CJI, is after all, not given to nor expected, to bare his soul.

The few words or lines by him encapsulate the entire system and act as a guiding light for the vast legal community. The most far reaching reform needed would be a serious attempt to unclog the system, which is at the moment burdened by a backlog of roughly three crore pending cases.

The CJI has already announced his intent of filling in 5,000 posts of judicial officers lying vacant in trial courts, arguably the back bone of the Indian legal system. It should be considered a fairly steep shortfall, given that these courts have a total sanctioned strength of little over 22,000. Through judicial orders, the CJI has also warned high courts and state governments to fill posts in a time-bound manner and more importantly, provide each officer with the required infrastructure needed to dispense justice.

Disposing off long pending cases - some of which go back several years - will get top priority under the new dispensation. The CJI has set up a ``think tank’’, comprising professionals whose job it will be to cull out logic employed by benches in reaching important, if voluminous judgments.

The depth of this outreach can be gauged from the fact that these judgments will be circulated among the masses to make them aware of how judges or benches arrive at a conclusion. But by far, the most impressive of the proposed reforms is procedural in nature.

As revealed by the CJI, it entails making copies of judgments to litigants in their mother tongue if the verdicts delivered in English are unintelligible to them - and apparently in a vast majority of instances, that appears to be the case. By any stretch of imagination, this is the most important connect between the judiciary and the common people. While it is still early days, some people are speculating if this a prelude to another round of robust activism that saw a pro-active judiciary back in the 1970s and the 1980s and even later, which finally led to a wide range of changes in India’s judicial system for all times to come.

Like most sectors, the judicial system is in dire need of changes. Unlike some former CJIs, who got bogged downs in their own troubles, CJI Gogoi appears to be motivated. It is precicely what this country needs.