LETTER FROM THE CJI TO THE CHIEF JUSTICES OF HIGH COURTS:

FEEDBACK FROM A CITIZEN

1. I have come across your letter dated 19 Jul 2023, addressed to all Chief Justices of the
High Courts, regarding explanation sought by a High Court judge for inconveniences caused
to him during his travel by a train. Though, late running of the train, lack of response of the
TTE and Catering Supervisor are the issues found raised, my view on this is that the judge,
as a consumer of the service provided by the railways, is entitled to get his grievances
redressed, though the procedure he has followed is questionable. As a citizen, my
experience tells me that there is a need to make even the railway service providers
accountable.
(Just a point of minor detail: while you have redacted identities to prevent further
embarrassment to the High Court, these details are easily available in public domain. Please
see the report at https://www.indiatoday.in/law/story/dy-chandrachud-writes-chief-
justices-after-judge-complains-over-train-journey-2409529-2023-07-20)

2. But there is a question that came to my mind on going through your letter: why is this
letter, with your email id, signature et al, in public domain? Personally I find that it should,
at best, have been addressed to the concerned judge only. If there are more cases of similar
nature that have come to your notice, then a letter could have been circulated, in general
terms, reminding fellow judges of the limits of their protocol privileges. In response to the
question above, what I was reminded of was the backlash that has appeared in the media
over the process followed for granting bail to Teesta Setalvad. I leave it to you to connect
the dots.

3. Before I proceed further, let me introduce myself as an activist in the area of

transparency and accountability in government, judiciary included, for the last 25 years. In
an article 'DEMOCRACY?…EAST IS EAST AND WEST IS WEST!', I had written in 2002, this is
what I had written about our judiciary:

Judiciary. But even the administration is a shade better when compared to our judiciary!
‘Justice delayed is justice denied’ is a maxim that one learnt in the primary school. So
imagine the state of affairs when even under-trials are left languishing in jails for 30 or
more years. When even a life-convict is expected to be kept in jail for only 14 years or
less, just imagine the horror of spending so many years in jail as an under-trial in a case
where the maximum punishment could be just a few months! Here is a report by
Swaminathan A Aiyer –‘Three liquidation cases in the Calcutta High Court remained
pending for more than 50 years. And India can boast of the longest legal dispute in
history- a land dispute in Maharashtra lasted 650 years! If no new case at all are
registered, says Debroy, the courts will take 324 years to dispose of the backlog at the
current rate of clearance.’ And this, when only 50 percent of the population is literate
and the majority of the population is simply worried where their next meal is going to
come from! Agreed that, as usual, resources needed are far more than what is available.
But to accept that and rest the case would be nothing but a fraud. And this is what
Justice V R Krishna Iyer has written in ‘Justice and Beyond’: ‘Why, in Gandhian India, are
sentencing provisions and practices sadistic and retributive, judges and administrators
dismissing as hawkish much therapeutic and corrective alternatives? When do we hope
to modernize, humanise and democratise our legal system and tune it upto to Third
World conditions?’
 Rule of Law not Rule of Judges. The mainstay of any civilized society, leave alone a
democracy, is the rule of the law. For any law to be effective it should, first of all, be
simple, clear and unambiguous. The affected people should understand it and imbibe it
in letter and spirit. The need to go to courts to get interpretations for each and every
clause certainly doesn’t speak well of the competence of our legislators. And worse,
when the judiciary interprets the same law to mean different, sometimes even
contradictory, things under different contexts, the public can only get confused and
confounded, as they are now. In this context it would be worth recalling that confusion
had prevailed even in recognising the preamble of our Constitution as an integral part of
it! In 1961, the Supreme Court had observed that ‘the preamble is not part of the
Constitution’, but in 1973, it held that ‘the preamble of the Constitution was part of the
Constitution and the observations to the contrary in Berubari Union case were not
correct’! Our present Union Minister for Disinvestment, Mr Arun Shourie, has done
yeomen service in compiling a number of intriguing cases in a book titled ‘Courts and
their judgments’. At the function held to release the book he also made a tongue-in-
cheek suggestion: that there should be a group of scholars reviewing all sensitive rulings
of the higher courts so that the judges were also careful that their judgments were
subjects to scrutiny! And this is what Ms Arundhati Roy, Booker-prize winner, has said:
‘the process of the trial and all that it entails, is as much, if not more of a punishment
than the sentence itself’.

4. Then in 2004, I wrote a full letter to the then Chief Justice of Kerala High Court on
'REFORMING OUR JUSTICE DELIVERY SYSTEM'. The text of this letter dated 18 Nov 2004 is
given at the end of this feedback for your perusal.

5. And since 2021, I have been writing a series of critiques about 'JUDICIAL PERFIDIES' and
sharing it with your office at the email id cji.office@sci.nic.in and supremecourt@nic.in
There has been a long break since I shared 'JUDICIAL PERFIDIES-27' on 21 Dec 2022. Of
course, there has not been any acknowledgement, leave alone any response. This, needless
to say, is totally unacceptable in a democracy. Just to put the record straight, this is what
the National Commission to review the working of the Constitution had clarified in its report
submitted in 2002: 'The highest office in our democracy is the office of citizen; this is not
only a platitude, it must translate into reality'.

6. The catalyst for the above series was the judgment of the Guahati High Court in WP(C)
4224/2016 and upheld by the apex court in SLP (Civil) Diary Number 18133/2019. What the
courts did not reckon with are the following facts:

The scheme of enhanced pension was introduced in 2006 by the 6th Central Pay
Commission.

It applied to all central government pensioners, as much as to the judges of our high
courts and apex court.

Thousands of central government pensioners and hundreds of high court/supreme court

judges would have attained 80 years of age and got the enhanced pension between 01
Jan 2006 and 2015 and none of them had raised such a ludicrous claim for obvious
reasons. So this verdict becomes applicable to all of them as well as to all those entering
80 years of age on their attaining the age of 79 years itself.
 Well, the same logic of entering and attaining an age, should extend to the retirement
age also and hence employees who have to retire on attaining 60/62/65 years of age will
now have to retire on entering those ages one year in advance.

It does not require Einstein’s intelligence to decide when a person would attain 80 years
of age when he has born on 30/07/1936 and retired on 29/07/1998 on the eve of
attaining the age of 62 on 30/07/1998. (Note: he is retired only with effect from
30/07/1998)

7. This has indeed disturbed a hornet's nest what with affected citizens approaching the
courts individually and in small groups to get what has now become due to them also. And
the courts instead of issuing an order applicable to all affected persons have failed to do so,
leading to unwarranted burden to the mountain of pending cases. And this is not an
isolated case.

8. To cut a long narrative short, it can easily be seen that the judiciary has failed not only on
the principle that justice delayed is justice denied but also on the principle that justice
should not only be done but seen to be done. And you are not seen doing anything to
correct this. Worse, you are seen wasting the courts time at taxpayers' cost by entertaining
unwarranted and irrelevant petitions. For example, reviewing the CAA and abrogation of Art
370. Do you thing you can put the clock back? Is it needed at all?

P M Ravindran
22 Jul 2023
raviforjustice@gmail.com to justice.dychandrachud@sci.nic.in

REFORMING OUR JUSTICE DELIVERY SYSTEM

This letter is being addressed to you in your capacity as the competent authority
responsible for maintaining the health of this system. I am of course one who is affected
very, very badly by its present very, very poor health. My aim here is to highlight certain
maliciousness manifest in the system and suggest some surgical measures needed to set
them right.

Contempt of Court Act – anathema to the very concept of democracy.

I quote the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution (NCRWC): ‘the
crucial failure is the innate resistance in governments and governmental processes to the
fundamental article of democracy, viz. that all power and all authority flows from the
people and that all public institutions are meant solely to serve the public interest. The
assurance of the dignity of the individual enshrined in the preamble of the Constitution has
remained unredeemed; from this fundamental breach of the constitutional faith flow
almost all our present ills. The first and the foremost need is to place the citizens of this
country at center-stage and demonstrate this prioritization in all manifestation of
governance'.

In this context, of the three -the law-making, law-executing and law-interpreting- organs of
the constitution, the law-making is the best, the executive, the next best and the law-
interpreting, the worst. The reasons are obvious. It is only the law-making politician who
actually reaches out to the people, at least on the eve of elections, and demonstrates his
accountability to them. Even the administration, the only one that can fail to deliver for
want of resources, is responsive to the extent that a lot of things get done in a predictable
manner and within time frames that are specified. To clarify this issue of resources, consider
the case of a town having 10 road junctions needing to deploy traffic police. In this case,
unless 10 traffic policemen are available at a time the traffic in the town as a whole can be
adversely affected. Or, consider the case of regulating a crowd. Depending on the strength
of the crowd, the strength of the police force also has to be comparable to ensure that
nothing untoward happens. Anything less could result in turmoil.

Coming to the judiciary, leave alone the concept of accountability it is difficult to identify
even any sense of responsibility. I quote the NCRWC: 'Judicial system has not been able to
meet even the modest expectations of the society. Its delays and costs are frustrating, its
processes slow and uncertain. People are pushed to seek recourse to extra-legal methods
for relief. Trial system both on the civil and criminal side has utterly broken down.' Also,
'Thus we have arrived at a situation in the judicial administration where courts are deemed
to exist for judges and lawyers and not for the public seeking justice'.

Still, in spite of all these, it is only the Judiciary that has been given unmerited and
unwarranted shelter under a perverse Contempt of Court Act. While repealing this Act may
be in the domain of the law-maker, there are any number of cases where courts have held
legislations, in whole and in parts, invalid. The Contempt of Courts Act is one which can and
should be abrogated by the judiciary itself in toto.

What we need in this democratic country is a Contempt of Citizen (Prevention of) Act and
we need it urgently too. Given the activist role the judiciary has taken on itself, I suggest
that the legislators be directed to bring in such a legislation without further delay.

Judicial accountability and the National Judicial Commission. A former CJI is on record that
20% judges are corrupt. Another CJI moaned that there is pressure on the Hawala Bench.
Yet another one expressed helplessness in tackling an instance of mass leave by high court
judges. Some CJsI, after demitting office, have even gone abroad and advised foreign
governments to avoid taking issues to Indian courts since the delays are preposterous. One
CJI, shortly after retiring, came to Kerala and passed some comments which, had it been
made by anybody else, would have landed him/her behind bars for contempt of court. Then
of course there are the Mysore, Rajasthan and Delhi cases reportedly involving the judges of
the high courts there. Suffice to say that the need for a National Judicial Commission to try
judges has been amply established. When even the President of India has asked his office to
be brought under the purview of the Lok Ayukt, it is disconcerting that the judiciary has not
responded positively to this need of ensuring transparency in its functions and integrity of
conduct of its members.

Judicial Accessibility. While the law-makers have reportedly favoured the establishment of
regional benches of the apex court and additional benches of the high courts in order to
mitigate the problems of justice-seekers to whatever extent such a measure would help, the
judiciary does not seem to be enthusiastic about it and is even denying the need for such a
measure. In the case of Kerala, though the Government of Kerala is in favour of establishing
the bench at Thiruvananthapuram, the judiciary needs to take cognizance of the fact that
when litigants from Thiruvananthapuram can come to Ernakulam, attend the court
proceedings and return to their homes the same day such facilities do not exist even for
litigants from Kozhikode which is located centrally in the Malabar region. Thus ground
realities dictate that a bench of the High Court needs to the established at the earliest at
Kozhikode. Similarly, regional benches of the apex court also need to be established in such
a manner that litigants can travel overnight by train, attend the court and return the next
night.

The Judicial process.

Ms Arundhathi Roy was modest in declaring that in our courts ‘the process is worse than
the judgment’. (Photostat copy of a letter received from a group of aggrieved consumers
along with a translation of the text is attached for your perusal. The identities have been
masked because it is not considered relevant.) Some key aspects of this process, their
implications and suggested remedies are given in the following paragraphs.

Listing of cases. This is one area that needs to be spruced up on a war footing. One is
shocked by the number of cases listed before each judge everyday when only a meager
fraction of this number is actually heard and decided on. The percentage of cases
adjourned, for whatever reasons, would easily be of the order of 80 to 90%., implying that if
100 cases are listed 160 to 180 litigants, excluding witnesses, are bound to return after
having wasted their resources-time, money and energy- for no fault of theirs. This is one of
the most easily solved problems because it would not be difficult to reduce the number of
cases listed for a day depending on the competence of the judge and catering for a margin
for lapses on the part of the litigants themselves. I would suggest that if a judge can hear
only 10 cases then not more than 15 cases should be listed.
Calling the cases listed for the day in a chronological order will also help the litigants to
track their turn without the need to remain tensely attentive throughout inside the court
hall.

Personal appearance of litigants/representatives. This is another area that can be cleaned

up with a bit of diligence on the part of judicial authorities. Except in criminal cases
involving large number of witnesses and especially in cases involving only documentary
evidence, the need for the affected parties to appear before the court should not arise
more than once or in the worst case twice. The Consumer Protection Act (CPA) when
enacted in 1986 was a more effective piece of legislation than it is now after two
amendments. The reason is simple. When 5 parties – the petitioner, opposite party/parties,
the judge(s), the advocates for the opposing parties- are involved in a case
absence/unpreparedness of any one party affects the progress of the case adversely. This
problem can be overcome ONLY by reducing the statements of the parties to writing and
the judges studying them independently, noting observations and seeking clarifications in
writing. The affected parties may be summoned only once before deciding the judgment
and may be once more when passing the orders.

Involvement of advocates. It is shockingly true that in our courts advocates for the opposing
parties in any case can find rules/ precedences to support their obviously opposing stands.
Ultimately, it would appear to an onlooker, that the judge can as well deliver his order by
tossing a coin! Further, it is not practically possible for the litigants to hire the services of
equally competent advocates. Thus the richer person tends to get undue advantage. This is
quite evident even in ‘Consumer Courts’ where the complainant is often a simple, law-
biding citizen of modest means and the opposite parties are establishments/organizations
with much greater resources at their disposal. When the second amendment to the CPA
was being contemplated there was a suggestion that opposite parties should be allowed to
engage advocates only if the complainant has engaged the services of an advocate.
Unfortunately it did not materialize. The reasons are anybody’s guess. But there was
certainly an opposition to it from the Bars. However the logic holds good even today and it
applies to regular courts as much as to ‘consumer courts’.
Citizens’charter and working hours. As with government offices delivering various services
of the government, the courts also need to publish Citizens’ charters giving out the details
of the qualitative and quantitative norms and cost for their services. This will include
displaying the working hours of the courts, approximate number of hearings, time frame for
completion of a case based on the clause on which a charge has been framed and the
authority who may be approached in case there is any default in following the Charter.

Grading of advocates and establishing norms for fees. To mitigate the injustice in
economically weaker litigants not getting the services of competent advocates, there is a
need to grade every advocate by his/her specialization, success rate etc and fix the fees
accordingly. Then it should be mandated that the economically better off litigant can only
hire the services of an advocate who is in the same category as the advocate hired by the
economically weaker litigant. Since these may fall within the purview of procedures it is
hoped that the courts have the jurisdiction to accept and implement them.

Irrationality and unfairness of decisions. There are any number of cases where the decisions
are patently devoid of reason, leave alone fairness. There is an order of the Kerala High
Court in a particular case making Section 56 of the CPC applicable while passing orders
under Section 27 of the Consumer Protection Act. This in effect actually excluded women as
a whole from the punitive provisions of a period legislation! Or, in other words, it literally
gave women a license to cheat and get away with it! And there are similar orders of the
apex court which one finds difficult to believe have actually been passed by supposedly
learned judges. For example, 'courts have jurisdiction to decide right or to decide wrong and
even though they decide wrong, the decrees rendered by them cannot be treated as
nullities' and 'there can be no interference in revision merely because the decision is
erroneous in law or in fact where there is no error pertaining to jurisdiction'. I can quote
similar instances in cases which I have personally pursued in consumer disputes redressal
fora / commissions and even the regular courts.

Conclusion. It would be naïve on my part to presume that our justice delivery system will
improve with writing a letter of this nature. It would be my effort to pursue this with a
satyagraha in front of the High Court of Kerala at Ernakulam on 31 Dec 2004 and 01 Jan
2005. I shall be approaching all civic society groups that I know of or heard of, for whatever
support they can offer. I am sure that the language of this letter is modest enough to
convey the grim facts that needed to be conveyed. It is just in keeping with the dignity of a
law-abiding citizen who according to our Constitution holds the highest office of the land. I
quote the NCRWC : 'The highest office in our democracy is the office of citizen; this is not
only a platitude, it must translate into reality'.

I shall be grateful if the contents of this letter are disseminated among your companion
judges.

Looking forward to a favorable response.

Regards and best wishes.

(P M Ravindran)