-INTRODUCTION
NV Ramana spoke that our legal system fails to consider social realities. He said this at the inauguration of a new building of the Odisha State Legal Services Authority. The chief Justice of India NV Ramana stresses to make the judiciary people friendly, he also emphasize the need to revisit the law and reform them so that they can suit the needs of the time and also people. So does our legal system fails to consider social realities?
According to him, the executive and the legislature should function in unison, so that the laws and rules get simplified for common people. It has been seen that, between the complex language of the acts that is very hard for the common man to understand. And more over the process of delivering justice, the common man feels like an outsider, he lost his fate in justice. For him getting justice in a country like India is really a tough task, which he shouldn’t feel.
He says that the way in which our system has been designed that, if all facts and laws are brought together in the court, much of them gets lost because of the due process.
He says people believe that the court make law, this notion needs to be dispelled. And where the notion is dispelled the role of legislature and judiciary starts and it has great significance. He urges to revisit law so that they match the practical realities, this is very true the law should not be complex and it should be easily understood to a common man. And it is very important that our law should match the practical realities.
He says if the legislature and the executive works in unison to realise the constitutional aspirations. And if this is done then the judiciary would not be compelled to step in as law makers. If this is done the work of judiciary will be very easy and it will be in a flow, as now they will only be left with the duty of applying law and interpreting the law.
There is also a need to bring legal awareness amongst them, those who have remained outside the view of all. His main emphasis was on faith of people, according to him power of the justice system is derived from faith of people. For a system to be strong, people’s faith needs to be there.
If a state is facing hurdles in justice system because of regional and economic disparity, then in that state challenge of accessing justice get magnified. The people should be made aware about the justice system and the provision available to them. They, follow social and religious customs which is the main hurdle in justice system. They are not aware to the language of the court and they feel alienated, so result of all these is that they don’t approach court for justice.
They use traditional methods for delivering justice, Chief Justice Nv Ramana also pointed that in Odisha 83.3% people live in rural area, so they are many a times excluded from formal justice system. If we take a look, in many villages of our country the scene is quite similar. Villagers are not aware about the justice system and moreover they are sometimes not having an idea that wrong is done to them. Campaign needs to be done. Development will start at low level.
A report say that 3.9 crore cases are pending at district and subordinate courts, 58.5 lakh cases in various high courts. And more than 69,000 cases are pending in the supreme court. Can one imagine the number of cases that are pending and the number of people that haven’t got justice yet are not even countable. This is the condition of our justice system, then how can one have faith in that. The only important thing is faith of people. How can people even believe that after we go to Court we are going to get justice. This data was about months ago, as I am writing this, the numbers must have crossed another limit.
A new study of access to justice in India found that 70% of those who have faced disputes in the past five years have gone to court, but the formal court system is still not the preferred form of dispute redress most of the Indians.
The study carried out in 2017 by the non-profit organization Daksh found that Indians prefer to seek a solution to family, friends, village elders, caste or religious panchayats in order to find a solution. In Daksh's study, respondents cited the courts and police as their least preferred options for seeking justice because they found the judicial system too expensive, too complex and too slow to resolve their disputes.
Daksh's report "Access to Justice, 2017" will be officially released on January 24th, along with another report from the philanthropic organization Dasra entitled "Tipping the Scale: Strengthening Systems for Access to Justice in India". The aim of the two reports is to draw attention to the need to improve the access and quality of judicial mechanisms in India, where the formal justice system often fails the most marginalized and disadvantaged populations. Access to justice for all is also one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.
Daksh, a judicial accountability NGO, conducted its 2017 three-month survey and interviewed 45,551 people in 28 states and 385 districts. The majority of respondents (73%) were men and the majority were illiterate or had completed basic education. Since, the survey included both rural and urban populations, almost half of the respondents were farm workers or landowners; 17% of the women were housewives.
Most respondents had no recent history of disputes but had a poor view of the formal justice system, while 74% said they would turn to friends and family for arbitration in disputes, and 49 % said they would turn to village elders or other social / political leaders, the two main pillars of the justice system were comparatively unpopular: 40% said they would not go to the police, while 32% said they would not use lawyers. Many can’t approach the court because of the financial condition. Another issue people face is dealing with police. Police are not considered as a helping body of the people now a days, it may be due to the police or the people have became too arrogant.
So, our legal system fails to consider social realities at a very great extent.
REFERENCES
- Livemint.com , -scrool.in ,
-bar and bench
- Times of India.
