PANAJI
Union Law Minister Kiren Rijiju on Monday said adopting effective use of technology is the government's aim to tackle the huge pendency while the eventual goal is to make the Indian Judiciary paperless.
"Phase III of the e-courts project has already begun to digitize the justice delivery system, Rijiju said while delivering his inaugural address to the 23rd Commonwealth Law conference which kicked off in the State on Monday.
The five-day conference is being attended by jurists and delegates from almost all Commonwealth countries.
Rijiju, who is the points man of the Modi government's interface with the judiciary in an ongoing back-and-forth with the Supreme Court Collegium over judicial appointments, said there should be a defined separation of powers between the three wings -- legislature, executive and judiciary.
“If any wing tries to encroach on the territory of another wing, that must be fiercely resisted because that poses great danger to democracy itself. If the legislature, executive or judiciary tries to overstep, it must be a concern for everybody. It is not one wing. It is for all to come together,” Rijiju said.
The Minister also said that anyone attempting to malign India and its institutions will not succeed. The comment was seemingly an oblique reference and supplementing the 'attack on India' narrative propagated by the BJP in reaction to Congress Leader Rahul Gandhi's lecture delivered at Cambridge in the UK last week.
“If anybody tries to discredit the Indian system, Indian democracy, Indian institutions, he will never succeed," Rijiju said in his address to the conference.
Referring to the huge 4.9 crore cases backlog before Indian courts, Rijiju said the bulk of these are before courts of the lower Judiciary.
Out of close to 4.9 crore pending cases, around 70,000 cases are in Supreme Court, and 10 per cent of cases are in HCs, while the rest are pending at the lower level.
He said, Rs 9,000 crore was allocated to beef up the lower judiciary in the country last year and Chief Justices of all High Courts have been urged to ensure all district courts function like a bench of the High Court.
