Lower courts settled nearly 21,000 cases last month pending

Out of the over 21 lakh cases pending for the past ten years across India, the subordinate judiciary settled nearly 21,000 of them last month.
But even as the judiciary went about clearing the backlog, fresh cases continued to pile up, with 5,77,834 fresh cases filed across subordinate courts in April.
The latest figures collated by the National Judicial Data Grid said out of the 20,835 cases settled by the lower judiciary in April, 13645 were criminal in nature and 7190 civil.
A civil case is a lawsuit that usually deals with contracts and torts. Torts are acts of negligence that result in damage or injury. Criminal cases involve an action that is considered to be harmful to society as a whole.

As per data available with the Grid, as on December 31, 2015, there were a total of 2,00,60,998 cases pending across the district courts in the different states.
Out of these, 83,00,462 or 41.38 per cent cases are pending for less than two years, while 21,72,411 or 10.83 per cent are pending for over 10 years.

As on May 3, courts in Uttar Pradesh disposed of 5556 cases in April which were pending for a decade. Out of these 1804 were civil while 3752 were criminal cases.
The lower courts in Gujarat followed closely by settling 3489 cases -- 1600 civil and 1889 criminal. In Maharashtra, the data says, 3287 cases -- 1011 civil and 2276 criminal -- pending for the past ten years were settled by the courts.

In a written reply, Law Minister D V Sadananda Gowda had informed Lok Sabha in December last year that the subordinate courts settled 1,9019,658 cases in 2014.
He had said that the 24 high courts disposed of 17,34,542 cases in 2014. The pendency in the high courts was estimated at 41.53 lakh at the end of December 2014.
The Supreme Court disposed of 44,090 cases last year till December one, while the pendency there has been estimated at 58,906 at the beginning of December 2015.
The e-Committee of Supreme Court had launched the National Judicial Data Grid to provide data on cases pending in the district courts across the country. The data is segregated into civil and criminal cases and further broken down on the basis of the number of years the cases have been pending.