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Maharashtra tops in justice delivery
Why in news?
- Maharashtra has topped the list of 18 large-medium States in the overall first-ever ranking of Indian States on justice delivery, followed by Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Punjab and Haryana.
More in news
- “India Justice Report 2019”: released by the Tata Trusts in collaboration with Centre for Social Justice, Common Cause, and Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, among others.
- Public data
(1) Report is based on publicly available data from different govt. entities on the four pillars of justice delivery — police, judiciary, prisons and legal aid.
(2) Data indicators from the four pillars, covered themes like infrastructure, human resources, diversity (gender, Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe/Other Backward Class), budgets, workload and trends over the last five years.
- Findings of the Report:
(1) Jharkhand, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are at the bottom in justice delivery.
(2) Among seven smaller States, Goa leads the group.
(3) The report highlights the fact that even the best performing States scored less than 60% in their performance on capacity across the police, judiciary, prisons and legal aid.
(4) We have about 18,200 judges with 23% sanctioned posts vacant.
(5) Women are poorly represented in these pillars, constituting just 7% of the police.
(6) Prisons are overoccupied at 114%, where 68% are undertrials awaiting investigation, inquiry or trial.
- Budget constraints
(1) Regarding budgets, most States are not able to fully utilise the funds given to them by the Centre, while the increase in spending on the police, prisons and judiciary does not keep pace with the overall increase in State expenditure,” the report said
(2) Some pillars also remain affected by low budgets. For instance, India’s per capita expenditure on free legal aid is 75 paise per annum.
- Justice (Retd.) Madan B. Lokur comments on report.
- Findings establish beyond doubt very serious lacunae in our justice delivery system.
- It is an excellent effort to mainstream the issues concerning our justice system, which in fact affect every aspect of society, governance and the economy.
Sources
The Hindu