Does Indian judiciary have any mechanism to monitor the cases in the country?
25 Apr, 2013Background
The appellant filed an application under the Right to Information (RTI) Act with the Supreme Court of India seeking information relating to the case monitoring system followed in Indian judiciary. He specifically wanted to know the manner in which the Supreme Court (SC) monitors the cases of the High Courts (HC) and the subordinate Courts. The Public Information Officer (PIO) observed that the Supreme Court did not have any administrative control over the High Courts and the subordinate Courts and therefore did not monitor the cases pending in or heard by those courts.
Proceedings
During the hearing before the Central Information Commission (CIC), the PIO submitted that after the RTI application had been filed the Supreme Court along with the central government took up an initiative to put in place an IT based case management system to create a database of all the cases pending before all the Courts of India and to assist the Courts at various levels to manage their case records in a better manner. The details of the initiative were available in the Supreme Court website. The appellant admitted to have already seen this and requested that the PIO should provide query wise response to all his queries.
View of CIC
The Commission directed the PIO to give whatever information available in material form and if there is no material record available in respect of any of the queries the PIO should state this clearly.
Comments
This case shows how RTI Act can be used effectively for bringing out reforms in the system. An effective IT based system to create a database of cases pending before all the Courts as follow up of RTI application would help in better monitoring and quicker disposal of cases.
Citation: Mr. Kalpeshkumar L Gupta v. Supreme Court of India File No. CIC/SM/A/2012/001719
RTI Citation : RTIFI/2013/CIC/1237
Click here to view original RTI order of Court / Information Commission