Obsolete laws and lengthy procedures, poor salaries of judges, pathetic infrastructure and endless litigation.

The blame squarely lies on the successive governments that have done nothing to improve the judicial infrastructure and legislature. They have failed to make effective laws with the changing times and the executive too has failed to execute orders, both in letter and spirit.

A fine example of this is Kasab, the lone terrorist who survived the attack. It is yet to be seen how many years it will take to punish him.

As of now, crores of rupees are being spent to protect his life. He is being treated as a national treasure, whereas we as a nation have moved on and our anger and anguish have slowly evaporated.

Everything which is written in one’s destiny has to happen and nothing is going to change in our country.

Ludhiana, better known as the Manchester of Punjab, has grown manifold in the past may years. Be it overpopulation, urbanisation and modernisation, the city’s infrastructure is not sufficient to sustain the teeming millions.

The number of civil and criminal cases pending in the court has increased.

With the passage of time, the courts which were originally constituted only to deal with civil and criminal litigations have been overburdened and designated to deal with newer and fresher legislations, whereas the training and day-to-day working methods are still archaic.

We should follow the footsteps of Bangalore where due to extra workload; newer methods are being to be adopted by separating civil and criminal cases at lower courts only. This helps in better management of different subjects resulting in improvement of day-to-day administration and speedy disposal of cases.

Therefore, the wisdom says that in big cities such as Ludhiana, criminal and civil courts should be separated so as to improve the efficiency of courts.

Though there are proposals of audio visual or video conferencing and connecting courts with jails for the speedy trial of undertrials, the proposal can only be practically implemented if we sieve cases at the lower level.

Many courts were computerised recently but it is useless, unless specialised and innovative programmes are made and installed to interconnect and integrate lower courts with the higher courts. Therefore, a reputed professional information technology consultant should be appointed to make specialised programmes that will help us in using computers as per our needs and reduce the unnecessary paperwork.

But the salaries of the judicial officers are not on a par with other sectors. Even fresh talent does not prefer to join judicial services owing to poor salaries and over work.

A fine example of it can be gauged from the fact that a station house officer has got powers under Section 482 of the Criminal Procedure Code (Nothing in this code shall be deemed to limit or affect the inherent powers of the High Court to make such orders as may be necessary to give effect to any order under this code, or to prevent abuse of the process of any court or otherwise to secure the ends of justice) but a lower court judge has got no powers.

This leads to imbalance of powers and some times is an obstruction in the administration of justice.

This imbalance undermines the position of judges in lower courts as all the powers under this section are with the High Court.

As a high court is already overburdened with case files and miscellaneous matters pertaining to this section, it is high time that both lower and high courts had concurrent powers to provide speedy justice to the general public.