Strengthening NJDG crucial for efficient dispute resolution system: CII

Business Standard

27-04-2025

The NJDG was launched in 2015 under the e-Courts Mission Mode Project to track, manage and reduce case pendency across India's judicial system
The National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) could accelerate dispute resolution, strengthen judicial efficiency, and foster a more investment-friendly business environment by enabling real-time, data-driven policy intervention, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) said.
The NJDG was launched in 2015 under the e-Courts Mission Mode Project to track, manage and reduce case pendency across India's judicial system.
In the World Bank Group's Doing Business Report 2020, India was ranked 163 out of 190 economies, the CII said.
'With over 5 crore cases pending across various courts and case disposal rates lagging behind the new admissions in many jurisdictions, urgent reforms are required to address the burgeoning pendency of cases," the CII said in its report.
The NJDG is an important initiative in the direction of reducing pendency by enabling data-driven policy interventions, it said.
The public policy advocacy body also outlined five specific recommendations to enhance NJDG effectiveness, which include suggestions such as the need for introducing a greater degree of specificity in categorisation of disputes in a manner that they are linked to their respective statutes and legal provisions.
'This would help in identifying the most as well as least invoked statutes, assess average resolution times of specific categories, pinpoint specific delays and learn from good practices, which all shall eventually help in implementing targeted policy measures for high-volume, time-intensive and obsolete provisions,' the CII said.
Secondly, the NJDG requires a more detailed and standardised case categorisation framework to ensure consistency and comparability in data reporting across courts, it said.
The CII has also recommended that all courts of the country report data on the NJDG on a continuous basis, it further said.
'A case in point is Tamil Nadu, which reports only 15 pending commercial cases at district level on the NJDG as against the actual number estimated to be around 5,000,' it said.
The scope of the NJDG needs to be enhanced to capture time taken at each procedural stage of litigation, the CII said.
Lastly, with a view to fostering competitive spirit among states, the NJDG could report real-time automated rankings of states based on the data collected on the Grid, it said.
'Ranking could subsequently be considered at more disaggregated levels, like for commercial and non-commercial cases separately,' it said.