Allahabad High Court urges parliament to incorporate ‘Litigation Impact Assessment’ clause in new bills

The Allahabad High Court recently observed that parliament and state legislatures should consider incorporating a clause for ‘litigation impact assessment’ in new bills. .Litigation impact assessment is a method used to analyse the effect that a new law may have.A Division Bench of Justices Alok Mathur and Amitabh Kumar Rai said that there was a need to take a holistic view of the staggering pendency of cases in courts. “We also take judicial notice of the fact that right of speedy trial is a mandate given by the Constitution of India to all its citizens in fulfillment of which the judiciary, executive and legislature are duty bound to do all that is necessary. It is noticed that there is a steady rate of institution of litigation on one hand while the rate of pendency has also not decreased and there is dire need to take holistic view of the entire situation and seek solutions before it is too late,” the Bench said..It made the following recommendation:“In this regard, after careful consideration, it would be in fitness of things if that the Parliament of India as well as the State legislatures may consider incorporating a clause in all the bills for“Litigation Impact Assessment” whenever a new bill is introduced and passed in the legislature.”The Court explained that each new enactment usually either creates rights or modifies or extinguishes existing rights, resulting in litigation at some point of time.“In case with some foresight the impact of litigation on passing each bill can be assessed it will be easy to make appropriate financial, infrastructural and human resource arrangements to cope up with the increase in litigation instead of tackling the problem after the pendency has galloped for ahead making it arduous stem and control it by subsequent actions,” the Bench emphasised. In this regard, the Court referred to the workload increased by the amendment made to Section 138 of Negotiable Instruments Act.“A simple example is with regard to amendment in Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act due to which half a dozen of judicial magistrates in each districts are dealing exclusively with such matters pertaining to cheque bouncing and simply at the time of passing of the bill, assessment if had been made regarding the increase in the number of additional courts could have been created before hand to tackle such additional fresh institution.”.The Court made these observations while dealing with a suo motu case related to the creation of an additional 9,149 courts in the State. About 900 courts were to be created in the first phase in 2025-2026. On April 13, the Court said that the matter has been pending for the past years during which time litigation has increased. It took note of the queries sent by the State to the High Court regarding the proposal of new courts and asked it not to waste time by raising frivolous objections. “Once the State has agreed to increase number of courts then only those queries should be raised which have the material bearing on the issues and not any frivolous queries which may indicate that the same are being send only to buy time. It is also expected that the State should send all the relevant queries in one fold rather than waiting for the reply from the High Court then sending another installments of queries for which purpose again few months time is consumed and this exercise keeps repeating keeping the matter pending,” the Court said. .It added that the State should take a final decision within one month. “In case a final decision is not taken by the next date of listing, Legal Remembrancer (LR) shall again appear in person before this Court on the next date of listing,” the Court ordered, while listing the matter for hearing next on May 19..Advocate Vijay Dixit and Additional Advocate General Sudeep Kumar appeared in the matter..[Read Order]