With 8 seats still vacant, ideal state of justice delivery remains distant dream

JAMMU: Sitting on an ever-growing pile of litigations- 75715 to be precise as on date, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court is seriously short of achieving an ideal justice delivery state, especially with almost half of its sanctioned strength of judges vacant.
Despite continuous efforts being made in recent past to reduce the rising pendency in J&K High Court, including emphasising on introducing various technical means by Chief Justice Gita Mittal herself, the pendency has increased by almost 75% in past two years, leaving barely any breathing space for the nine judges of the High Court, each of them burdened with as many as 8412 cases, as on date.
There are a total of 75715 cases pending before the Jammu and Kashmir High Court. As per the data available with The News Now, among those, whopping 40016 are civil suits, making for 52.85 percent of the total pendency while criminal cases awaiting adjudication are 8140, while 27559 writ petitions are staring the court in the face.
The only breather that could be seen in these testing times is the appointment of Advocate Rajnesh Oswal as the HC Judge, taking the total number of judges to 9 against sanctioned 17.
It may be mentioned here prior to Oswal, no new judge was appointed to the J&K High Court since August 2018.
While the Supreme Court Collegium had recommended as many as six names for their elevation as the judges of the high court in past eight months, only one of them—of Advocate Rajnesh Oswal was cleared.
Names of Advocate Moksha Kazmi Khajuria and Advocate Javed Iqbal Wani, along with Judicial Officers Vinod Chatterji Koul, Sanjay Dhar and Puneet Gupta are pending with the Union Law Ministry for their approval.
That the Jammu and Kashmir is marred by the slow pace of justice seeking and deliverance system could be gauzed from the fact that over 11 percent of the all cases- 8257 have been awaiting adjudication for more than 10 years, ten being the lower slab.
The things are not rosy for other litigations, either. Around 32.15% cases- way more than the national average of 19.87%- have been pending disposal for more than 5 years, upper ceiling being 10 years here.
This huge pendency has arisen despite the fact that the High Court resolved to adopt a rather swift pace in dealing with litigations in recent past.
However, with the number of judges remaining less than half of the sanctioned strength for until today, the Jammu and Kashmir high court has witnessed an increase of 75% in the pendency in past two years.
There were 43268 litigations pending before the court in February 2018.
The state of subordinate judiciary is no better. There are currently 180535 litigations pending before the other courts in the union territory.
Justice Gita Mittal, ever since her appointment as the 34th Chief Justice of the high court in August 2018, has been taking an active interest in seeing into it that pendency is reduced while laying stressing on fast pacing the hearings of cases using various technical means so as to make courts ‘the first resort of seeking justice’ and there are some visible changes on the ground.
In the subordinate judiciary, there were 4608 cases disposed against 6911 litigations filed in the month of February, an rather satisfying disposal rate of 66.67%.
However, the figures have not remained as consistently encouraging as the last month’s, with the intermittent spike in the disparity between numbers of cases filed and cases disposed being seen as a whole.