Law Minister looks to fulfill promise of creating 15000 additional judges posts with two new all-India services on the anvil

Law Minister, Veerappa Moily’s ambitious plans of reducing the pendency of court cases in India and creating 15,000 additional judges’ posts in India seems to be taking shape with two new all-India services. The Indian Judicial Service (IJS) and the Indian Legal Service (ILS) aims to meet the demand for services of legal professionals from various departments of the Union and State governments. 

Law Minister, Veerappa Moily’s ambitious plans of reducing the pendency of court cases in India and creating 15,000 additional judges’ posts in India seems to be taking shape with two new all-India services. The Indian Judicial Service (IJS) and the Indian Legal Service (ILS) aims to meet the demand for services of legal professionals from various departments of the Union and State governments. 

Speaking to the Times of India, the Law Minister said, “We will create two all-India services — IJS and ILS — mainly aimed at capacity building at the lower levels of judiciary and to provide professional legal advice to various departments.” 

The national daily goes on to report that the ministry's Vision Document prepared last year had promised creation of 15,000 posts of judges for two years to tackle the huge backlog of nearly 2.5 crore cases in the trial courts. But, with that apparently not working out, the Government is keen to add to the number of nearly 17,000 existing trial court judges by creating the IJS. Explaining the need for ILS, the Law Minister said there was dearth of professional legal hands in various departments of the State Governments and the Centre when it comes to seeking legal opinion on various day-to-day issues. 

"On complex and constitutional issues, the Centre has the Attorney General, Solicitor General and a team of Additional Solicitors Generals to seek opinion from. The States too have the Advocate General and a team of legal professionals. But they being required to attend the courts daily hardly have time to give opinions on all issues on the plate of various departments. Hence, creation of an all-India legal service would fill the void." 

The National Litigation Policy unveiled by the Law Ministry had aimed to reduce average pendency time from 15 years to 3 years. This also includes identifying ‘bottlenecks’ and removing unnecessary Government cases. With the Government being identified as one of the biggest contributor to the number of pending cases in the country, these two new services should come as welcome news.