Stronger judicial data grid can boost investments, says CII report

Strengthening the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) could accelerate dispute resolution, strengthen judicial efficiency, and foster a more investment-friendly environment by enabling real-time, data-driven policy intervention, according to the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). The NJDG was launched in 2015 under the e-Courts Mission Mode Project to track, manage, and reduce case pendency across India’s judicial system.

 

In the World Bank Group’s Doing Business Report 2020, India was ranked 163 out of 190 economies, the CII said in a report. “With over 5 crore cases pending across various courts and case disposal rates lagging behind the new admissions in many jurisdictions, urgent reforms are required to address the burgeoning pendency of cases.” 

 

NJDG is an important initiative for reducing pendency by enabling data-driven policy interventions, it said. The public policy advocacy body also outlined five recommendations to enhance the effectiveness of NJDG. The first recommendation is to introduce a greater degree of specificity in the categorisation of disputes in a manner that these can be linked to their respective statutes and legal provisions. 

 

“This would help in identifying the most as well as the least invoked statutes, assess average resolution times of specific categories, pinpoint specific delays, and learn from good practices, all of which shall eventually help in implementing targeted policy measures for high-volume, time-intensive, and obsolete provisions,” the CII said.

 

Secondly, the NJDC requires a more detailed and standardised case categorisation framework to ensure consistency and comparability in data reporting across courts, it said. The CII also recommended that all courts report data on the NJDG continuously, the CII added. “A case in point is Tamil Nadu, which reports only 15 pending commercial cases at the district level on NJDG as against the actual number estimated to be around 5,000.”

 

CII further said that the scope of NJDG needs to be enhanced to capture the time taken at each procedural stage of litigation. And to foster a competitive spirit among states, the NJDG could report real-time automated rankings of states based on the data collected on the grid. “Ranking could subsequently be considered at more disaggregated levels, like for commercial and non-commercial cases,” it added.