Peoples Telangana

“WHEN justice is accessible to all, delivered in a timely manner, and reaches every individual regardless of their social or financial background—that is when it truly becomes the foundation of social justice.” Thus declared Narendra Modi on November 8th, addressing a conference on legal-aid delivery at the Supreme Court. The prime minister’s cadence was vintage: soaring, inclusive, unassailable. The facts on the ground—and in comparative perspective—are rather less inspiring. Start with timeliness. India’s courts are choked with over 50m pending cases; the Supreme Court alone carries more than 80,000. Average resolution times stretch to a decade in lower courts. Judicial vacancies stand at 40%—some 5,000 posts unfilled despite repeated pledges. The judiciary’s budget is a derisory 0.08% of GDP. Lok adalats, the government’s flagship fast-track mechanism, dispose of just 1-2% of cases annually. Contrast this with peers: Britain’s Crown Courts clear 90% of criminal cases within a year; ...

  The Modi government obviously thinks it’s easier to change the narrative than the reality. Whatever the narrative of being the world’s third largest economy (PPP), the reality that gnaws at Modi’s bones is India’s ranks ng in the Global Hunger Index. “While bristling at the ratings, what the minister didn’t reveal was that her ministry had over the past year made multiple attempts at lobbying with the publishers of the Global Hunger Index to bump up India’s ranking. Then union minister Smriti Irani wrote to NITI Aayog in February 2020, asking the think tank to “rectify” “issues” in the index. The government wanted the publishers to make critical changes to how they score the countries. One of them was to focus less on malnutrition among children, an indicator where India performed poorly – even by the government's own admission – and dragged down its overall score. The government thought the hunger index was too “biased” towards children and even argued that a large number of inf...