Don’t wait for a national judicial service

If the states aren’t open to the idea, find other ways to improve performance

Union law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Wednesday batted for establishing an all-india judicial service, with an entrance test conducted by the Union Public Service Commission, to create a pool of trained judicial officers, attract “talented law students” and help SC/ST students (through a reservation process) so as to make the judicial services far more representative than what it is today. This is not a new idea; it came up first in the 1960s and has also been mentioned recently in Niti Aayog’s ‘Strategy For New India @ 75’ report.

There is no doubt that the Indian legal service has quality challenges. There are also a large number of vacancies in lower courts (5,000 at least). And as the minister said, the judiciary is not representative. A February 2018 study done by the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy said since its inception in 1950, the Supreme Court has only seen six women judges (now eight with the elevation of Justices Indu Malhotra and Indira Banerjee in April and August). However, it is not entirely true that there is no reservation in judiciary; some states such as Bihar have reservations in state judiciary. While the demand to improve quality of the judiciary is a fair one, states and high courts have not been open to it : no one wants any erosion of power. The other problem is that have used powers under the CRPC and Criminal Procedure Code (CPC) to declare that a local language can be used in lower courts. Lack of knowledge of local language could hamper judicial efficiency, they claim. If efficiency is one of the main reasons for rolling out a national judicial service (a sound idea) — and states are not keen on it — all stakeholders need to put their heads together to find out other ways of improving the quality of intake and conduct transparent performance evaluations . This process of improving the present system must not wait for all stakeholders to agree on a national judicial service.