Illuminating Judicial Productivity in India's District Courts: An Empirical Analysis
Uploaded: 8 months ago; Last updated: 7 months ago ; Date of Publication: 4-August-2023
All India
2010 - 2018
English
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Studies on court administration in India have so far focussed their attention largely on caseload management and judge strength of the higher judiciary. An in-depth investigation of the productivity of India’s lower courts, the primary loci of a citizen’s contact with the judiciary, remains missing. We conduct a novel, quantitative analysis of a large dataset of more than 1700 district courts across India between 2010 and 2018, to measure court productivity through the metric of case disposal.
Research Paper
We aim to understand the impact of well-established factors - working strength and tenure of judges, case administration, age distribution of cases, and category or case type - on this measure of district court productivity. Our overall results show that there is a huge variation in productivity across district courts in the country. We find that court type and nature of cases are important predictors of a district court’s productivity.
