Study on Supreme Court says increase in number of Judges alone may not be enough to tackle Judicial Delays

While a small increase in the number of judges appointed to the Supreme Court of India or a cap on adjournments may have significant positive benefits on the case disposal performance, such benefits may be temporary until the issue of workload management is tackled, a recent study has found. .Titled Reducing Judicial Delay in Resource-Constrained Settings: A Data-Driven Queueing Approach, the report by Nitin Bakshi, Associate Professor at the University of Utah, and Ramandeep Randhawa, Professor at the University of Southern California notes:."... the Supreme Court of India operates in a nearly critically-loaded regime (nearly 100% utilization of capacity) that is characterized by substantial delays, and small perturbations to capacity or process efficiency have dramatic impact on system performance. In particular, increasing judge capacity by 7% (adding a bench) results in a 75% − 90% reduction in average delay. Alternatively, capping the number of adjournments allowed in a case to the recommended number three, also results in a comparable delay reduction.".Here, "utilization" is calculated as the ratio of the rate of incoming workload brought by arriving cases to the available judicial capacity..The report notes that recently, the case backlog at the Supreme Court has been hovering around 60,000 cases, which is close to one year’s worth of workload (after correcting for any double-counting of cases)..There are two broad methods to improve the case disposal rate at the Supreme Court i.e boosting infrastructure (appointment of more judges would fall under this category), and eliminating process inefficiency (including by capping the number of adjournments). ."Our finding that the SCI operates close to a critically loaded regime implies that either intervention will have a significant positive benefit in our performance metrics", the report states. .However, the report goes on to point out that if the number of incoming cases are not properly managed, the effect of such measures is unlikely to remain. In this regard, the report has also found that the "Rate of Disposal Method", endorsed by the Law Commission of India and which focuses on ensuring that "the number of disposals [of cases] equals the number of institutions in any one year", may not be enough to manage the workload..The report explains that in the presence of a need to take on more cases, such an approach can avoid unwarranted congestion only in a deterministic world."Due to variability, the expected disposition time blows up as server utilization approaches 100%, which is undesirable for obvious reasons. The SCI is operating in precisely this brittle regime, seemingly due to its focus on only ensuring [utilization is less than 100%], but otherwise maximizing throughput. With such a focus, we conjecture that the relief provided by measures such as adding judges will be temporary as it will soon be offset by admitting more cases — via appeals — to the SCI’s docket", the report adds..To address this issue, the report aims to offer a rigorous approach whereby a solution is offered by factoring in both judicial capacity and workload management. The authors recommend that unless there are compelling reasons to believe that the rate of litigation has decreased, the Supreme Court should guard against accepting more cases. .Queueing theory adopted to study the Supreme Court.To analyse how well the Court has been functioning in terms of case disposal rates and how to improve the system, the authors relied on the queueing theory, a mathematical discipline that studies congested systems. ."Specifically, we model a case-management queue wherein a case can have multiple hearings across time but always with the same panel of judges — similar to a patient–doctor relationship in a medical setting. We simulate the performance of a case management system and use it to study judicial delays at the SCI", the authors explain..Three key components were studied as part of this process by the authors i.e. the arrival process (how cases are brought to the Supreme Court via the Registry), service process (to do with assigning the case to a judicial bench and its hearing) and the hearing outcome..For their study, the authors analyzed the details of cases registered with the Supreme Court between 2009 and 2016. For their baseline results, the authors also assumed a strength of 28 Supreme Court judges, which was the prevailing strength in 2017 when the analysis was initiated. Consistent with the guidelines provided in the Supreme Court’s Handbook on Practice and Procedures, they found that judges at the Supreme Court hear matters for 4.5 hours every working weekday..Notably, they go on to find that since the Supreme Court operates close to a critically loaded regime, even a small change in its process, say a change of 0.01 hours in the workday, can lead to a dramatic change in the performance of the system..For instance, the effect of adding an additional Bench for the Supreme Court is captured in the table below. .Similar to the impact of adding judges, the report goes on to state that a cap on the maximum number of adjournments granted per case reduces the average disposition time to around a month, both for the case of 4.5 hour and 4.51-hour workdays..Summarising the report, the authors state, "... we find that SCI is operating close to a critically loaded regime such that any improvement in operations, either via increase in capacity or by decreasing work via reducing adjournments, has considerable beneficial impact. We find that the process-level change of capping adjournments at three has an impact comparable to that of adding a two-judge bench.".Limitations of the report.The authors, however, add that the simulation model adopted by them to compile the report makes certain assumptions due to methodological constraints and limitations on the availability of data. The assumptions include that the outcome of a hearing for a case is independent of how long the case has been pending. This assumption is consistent with the principle that judges will not compromise on the quality of their decision in order to speed up disposal.."... our goal is to create a model that is tractable yet realistic enough to generate robust results", the authors add, further stating that "our main insight that the SCI is operating in the nearly critical regime remains valid.".The authors also make pertinent observations touching upon the likelihood of taking the remedial steps suggested in the report. It is noted that adding judges would entail factoring in not only financial implications, but also "the availability of suitably qualified judges.".On the other hand, while the measure of capping adjournments seems to be "free", it would have to be viewed more in terms of its impact on procedural fairness..Read the report: