Analyzing HC-NJDG Data to Understand the Pendency in High Courts in India

Indian Judiciary is suffering from burden of millionsof cases that are lying pending in its courts at all the levels. Hon'ble Supreme Court of India has initiated e-Courts project to deploy Information and communication Technology in the judiciary so as to efficiently impart justice without compromising on its quality. The National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) is an important outcome of this project that indexes all the cases pending in the courts and publishes the data publicly. The launch of NJDG has also resulted in a jump of 30 ranks in the World Bank’s Ease Of Doing Business Report.In this paper, we analyze the data that we have collected on the pendency of 24 high courts in the Republic of India as they were made available on High Court NJDG (HC-NJDG). We collected data on 73 days beginning August 31, 2017 to December 26, 2018, including these days. Thus, the data collected by us spans a period of almost sixteen months. We have analyzed various statistics available on the NJDG portal for High Courts, including but not limited to the number of judges in each high court, the number of cases pending in each high court, cases that have been pending for more than 10 years, cases filed, listed and disposed, cases filed by women and senior citizens, etc. Our results show that:1) statistics as important as the number of judges in high courts have serious errors on NJDG (Fig. 1, 2, 10, 11, Table V).2) pending cases in most of the high courts are increasing rather than decreasing (Fig. 3, 13).3) regular update of HC-NJDG is required for it to be useful. Data related to some high courts is not being updated regularly or is updated erroneously on the portal (Fig. 14).4) there is a huge difference in terms of average load of cases on judges of different high courts (Fig. 6).5) if all the high courts operate at their approved strength of judges, then for most of the high courts pendency can be nullified within 20 years from now (Fig. 21, 22).6) the pending cases filed by women and senior citizens are disproportionately low, they together constitute less than 10% of the total pending cases (Fig. 23 - 27)7) a better scheduling process for preparing causelists in courts can help reducing the number of pending cases in the High Courts (Fig. 29).8) some statistics are not well defined (Fig. 31).