Minister of Law and Justice, Veerappa Moily announced the ‘National Litigation Policy’ (NLP) to reduce the average time of pending cases in India from 15 years to 3 years. The NLP aims at reducing government litigation in courts. Launching the NLP to make government an "efficient and a responsible" litigant, Moily said, “monitoring and review mechanism proposed under it would prevent delay or neglect of important cases such as the Bhopal gas tragedy.”

The Law Minister had in October 2009 released a vision statement at a two-day conference on National Consultation for Strengthening the Judiciary Towards Reducing Pendency and Delays to reduce the backlog of cases. However, some of the suggestions laid out in the vision statement have not been included in the NLP such as introduction of night courts, appointment of judges on a contractual basis and establishment of a National Arrears Grid.

The NLP focuses on the 10 core issues and discusses adjournments, quality of legal drafts, revision of legal fees for lawyers and several other issues. Here is a brief of the issues discussed in the NLP:

Vision

• It discusses the purpose, in reducing average pendency time from 15 years to 3 years. This also includes identifying ‘bottlenecks’ and removing unnecessary Government cases.

Government Panels, Manuals and Appeals

• Government Panels cannot be vehicles for sustaining incompetent and inefficient persons. Persons who recommend names for inclusion on the Panel are requested to be careful in making such recommendations and to take care to check the credentials of those recommended with particular reference to legal knowledge and integrity.
• Screening Committees for constitution of Panels will be introduced at every level to assess the skills and capabilities of people who are desirous of being on Government Panels before their inclusion on the Panel. The Ministry of Law shall ensure that the constitution of Screening Committees will include representatives of the Department concerned. The Screening Committees will make their recommendations to the Ministry of Law. Emphasis will be on identifying areas of core competence, domain expertise and areas of specialization. It cannot be assumed that all lawyers are capable of conducting every form of litigation.
• The fee structure will be revised for the Government lawyers and reduce the delay in payment of legal fees.
• The ‘Government Advocates Manual will contain draft format .
• The NLP has detailed the process of filing an appeal and stressed the reasons for filing of an appeal before various courts.

The NLP ends, “All pending cases involving Government will be reviewed. This Due Diligence process shall involve drawing upon statistics of all pending matters, which shall be provided for by all Government departments (including PSUs). The Office of the Attorney General and the Solicitor General shall also be responsible for reviewing all pending cases and filtering frivolous and vexatious matters from the meritorious ones”.

There are more than 2 crore cases pending before various Courts and it is estimated that the Government is involved in nearly 50 percent of the cases. The office of Attorney General or the Solicitor General may not have the appropriate staffing to review such a huge backlog of cases.

A copy of the ‘National Litigation Policy’ is available here.