Even tribunals fail to clear pile-up of pending cases

The Government went for creation of various tribunals to reduce the workload on the High Courts struck with the pile-up of the backlog of cases, but even these overworked tribunals are not able to deliver because of several issues like poor infrastructure, slow appointments, dependency on parent ministry and shortage of staff.

A Delhi-based legal thinktank, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, carried out an analysis of 37 tribunals functioning in the country to find that despite the increase in the disposal rate, there is also high rate of pendency, attributed to reasons like avoidable adjournments and absenteeism.

It says the tribunals have very high workload on the presiding officers due to slow process of appointments as well as high dependence on the parent ministry to take care of their finances. Only recently, the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal took over the functioning of Cyber Appellate Tribunal which was without a chairman for over five years.

The Customs, Excise and Service Tax Appellate Tribunals had 90,592 pending cases while the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal had also piled up the backlog of 90,538 cases, according to the 272nd Law Commission report. It showed that the Central Administrative Tribunals had the pile-up of 44,333 cases while the Armed Forces Tribunal had 10,222 pending cases.