Aayog for ‘judicial performance index’

New Delhi, Aug. 29: The government think tank Niti Aayog has suggested establishment of a judicial performance index to check delay in finalisation of cases in lower judiciary.

It has also recommended streamlining judicial appointments through an online system.

“The first step (towards judicial reforms) would be to establish a judicial performance index. Such an index could be established to help high courts and high court chief justices keep track of performance and process improvement at the district courts and subordinate levels for reducing delay,” it said in a report released recently. This would require fixing nonmandatory time frames for different types of cases as broad guidelines to benchmark when a case has been delayed, it said.

“Using existing infrastructure and data, indicators could be created to see how long cases have been pending, what percentage of cases have been delayed and how many cases were disposed in the last year compared to the year before,” according to the ‘Three Year Action Agenda, 201718 to 2019- 20’.

It suggested study of internationally developed measures such as ‘global measures of court performance’, created jointly by the Australasian Institute of Judicial Administration, the Federal Judicial Centre (US), the National Center for State Courts (US) and the Subordinate Courts of Singapore.

“The index can also include certain progress on process steps that have already been approved by high courts, like burden of day-to-day activity being removed from judges and given to administrative officials,” the report said.