Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations (30 page)

It can offer a framework for an efficient power system, providing the technical design of a future smart grid and help us address commercial and behavioural issues. In the technical design of a smart grid, IT can help monitor and control electricity real-time with fine granularity, construct a robust, self-healing grid—detect outages, load, congestion and shortfall, and establish two-way power exchange with a large number of renewable generators, storage devices and devices such as plug-in hybrid vehicles. In terms of commercial and behavioural issues, IT can help identify theft and losses, provide choice to customers, allow for new pricing mechanisms such as Time-of-Day (ToD) or real-time, enable much improved transparency and conservation, and provide the structure for sophisticated billing, collection and information management.

So, what are technology’s limitations in this sphere? The report states:

We must remember that IT by itself cannot change practices and fundamentals directly. This includes altering the fundamentals of the power system—including supply and demand, tariff structure and power quality—changing operational practices and organizational culture, reducing losses and theft, meeting environmental challenges, and changing governance and project management. People, especially trained and equipped personnel, are the critical players in affecting this transformation.

Any such solution needs to take into account the crippling burden that power subsidies place on the administration. We advocate a move towards a direct benefit transfer model for subsidies so that state electricity boards can focus on their key mandate, that of providing reliable power to all citizens, instead of diverting their energies towards subsidy management.

Renewable energy sources may still be in the early stages of growth in India, but they hold tremendous potential. The sight of solar panels dotting the roofs of city houses is no longer unfamiliar, and the new
office of the ministry of environment and forests in New Delhi is powered by a solar rooftop system. As these intermittent power sources start plugging into the grid, they will need to be handled efficiently. Small producers will start contributing to the network, giving rise to two-way energy flows. Grids will need to develop the storage capacity to handle such inputs and integrate them into the management of demand and supply. Instead of building power generation plants to a peak power capacity, the declining price of storage can be leveraged to build low-cost battery systems that can store power as needed and supply it in the face of high demand. A cautionary tale in this regard comes from Hawaii, where the supply of solar energy from homes has so overwhelmed local power utilities that, until recently, customers were banned from installing new solar rooftop systems; power companies there and elsewhere are trying to curtail the rise of solar energy by making it financially unviable for both customer and solar energy companies.
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We also anticipate a change in the behaviour of the average Indian consumer, from being a passive recipient of power to an active participant in the power grids of the future. They can optimize their power consumption patterns through the use of innovations like Nest that provide real-time information on power usage. Feed-in tariffs—where customers get paid for supplying energy to the grid, generated by the use of electric cars or rooftop solar panels, for example—can incentivize the use of renewable energy sources, and the concept of clean energy and carbon credits can be brought to consumers to promote the widespread adoption of energy-saving practices.

When it comes to the organizational management of smart grids, India’s crumbling public-sector energy utilities, beset by inefficiency, corruption and heavy financial losses, are inadequate to shoulder the burden. We need a mechanism where we can draw upon the expertise of those from the government as well as from the energy sector, and bring in multiple stakeholders to function in unison—power utilities, regulators, policymakers, technology service providers, standards bodies, consumer groups and experts in the fields of technology, economy, law and others. Another key function of the government in creating a
new model of energy management would be to promote innovation in the private sector by setting in place common standards and protocols that can serve as the basis for new operating models in the production, distribution and consumption of energy.

India’s power sector is precariously poised today. We can no longer use subsidies to insulate ourselves from the shocks in worldwide energy pricing, we cannot turn a deaf ear to the increasing clamour around the use of fossil fuels, and we cannot ignore the fact that our energy policies and practices are completely unsustainable in the long term. We have an unparalleled opportunity to implement technology-powered solutions that can pave the way for India to become a pioneer in building smart, sustainable energy solutions that can power the nation’s economy forward.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

—Aristotle

AT THE RISK of stating the extremely obvious, the Indian judicial system is in trouble. By any measure you choose, our judiciary is a woeful underperformer, whether it is in the number of judges and courts available to us, or the speedy disposal of cases placed before them. We have only ten to fifteen judges per million people, and our judge-to-population ratio is among the lowest in the world.
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As of 2014, the total number of pending cases across India was a staggering 30 million.
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If the judiciary at its existing strength were to roll up its sleeves and tackle the Herculean task of resolving all the cases pending across the country, Andhra Pradesh High Court Judge V.V. Rao estimated it would take them 320 years to clear the backlog.
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A few years ago, Delhi Chief Justice A.P. Shah admitted that the Delhi High Court was lagging behind by 466 years; in an attempt to clear up its caseload, the court decreased the average time spent hearing a case to a little over five minutes.
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Even five minutes in court would be a welcome relief for the 300,000 inmates of India’s prisons who languish in custody while
waiting for their case to be heard. Their numbers are growing steadily, and many of them are either illiterate or poorly educated. If their case is to be heard by a higher court—as in the case of an appeal—they’re in for another endless wait, since it takes an estimated fifteen to twenty years for a case to wend its way from the lower courts all the way up to the Supreme Court.
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No wonder, legal cases in India often become family heirlooms, with the children and grandchildren of the litigants faithfully continuing to fight for their family’s cause long after the original complainants are dead and gone.

While mind-boggling in scale, none of these problems are particularly new. Starting with the pre-Independence-era Rankin Committee in 1924, there has been an endless parade of committees, commissions, conferences and reports, all dedicated to the problem of judicial reform. Clearly there is no shortage of ideas when it comes to increasing judicial efficiency, including such obvious measures as hiring more judges and building more courts. Why haven’t they been implemented?

Part of the answer is money. India spends less than 1 per cent of its GDP on the judiciary, far less than that in other democracies.
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More than half of this paltry sum is raised by the judiciary itself through court fees and fines. Another is the set of checks and balances placed on the judiciary by the executive and the legislature. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers:

The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.
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While meant to ensure an equitable distribution of power, these constraints do have a major impact on the functioning of the
judiciary. So much so that in 2007, the then chief justice of India, K.G. Balakrishnan, laid the blame for the glacial pace of India’s legal system squarely at the feet of the government, saying, ‘The main cause for judicial delay lies not so much with the judiciary as with the executive and administrative wing of the government.’
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At this point in time, the problems of the Indian judiciary are too deeply entrenched to be solved by simply throwing more money at the system to appoint more judges or build more courts. In recent years, we have seen the emergence of fast-track tribunals in an attempt to speed up the process of dispensing justice, but even these are the equivalent of trying to stem a fire hose with a cork. We cannot think of any other aspect of Indian society where it is so clear that the standard solutions simply will not work. It’s time to redesign the judiciary’s operating system, and create a new class of processes and institutions that will make our legal system fast, fair and transparent. Technology is the foundation upon which these processes and institutions must be built.

The first class of reforms includes the creation of technology-based systems to handle the everyday minutiae of the legal process. Nearly 90 per cent of the work involved in preparing a case for trial does not need a judge’s intervention. This consists of such routine tasks as generating documents, collecting evidence and scheduling trials, while ensuring that the laws regulating these tasks are being followed. Such activities can easily be systematized and speeded up by developing technology-based applications to handle data and monitor progress, lessening the burden on judicial officials and saving precious courtroom time that is otherwise wasted on debating trivial matters of procedure.

Today, India’s judicial system continues to remain largely opaque, with an ordinary individual having little information and even less control over the progress of their case through the courts. Procedures may often seem cumbersome and confusing, leading to their being followed incorrectly and adding to the delay. A centralized, technology-
powered court operations platform would help to address these issues, and this is the second class of reform we propose.

Such a platform could function as an electronic repository of all case records and documents, allowing both judges and participants to search the database for relevant information. This becomes especially important in a system like ours, which is almost entirely paper-dependent and routinely generates reams of paper for each case. India’s longest running trial, the 1993 Mumbai bomb blast case, generated over 120,000 pages of legal material, which had to be ferried to court in trucks.
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Misplacing even a single sheet of paper can result in inordinate delays, and digging through a library’s worth of paper to find a necessary document or piece of information is an enormous waste of time. Creating an electronic database makes it easy to keep track of judicial records, as well as setting in place standardized processes for the capture and storage of information, thereby reducing ambiguity in the system and eliminating delays due to incorrect record-keeping.

A court calendar with details of court activities and hearings will make it extremely easy to follow the progress of a case, and will also allow for metrics to be generated that measure efficiency and flag inordinate delays as requiring further investigation. Cases are often prolonged indefinitely thanks to an endless series of adjournments; a 2000 amendment to the Civil Procedural Code sought to address this issue by allowing only three adjournments per case. The court calendar can be used to track the number of adjournments granted, and cases that have reached the three-time limit can be flagged for immediate hearing, ensuring that a major reason for legal delay is eliminated instantaneously.

Each individual case can be monitored via a dedicated case planner, where judges define a plan for each case based on its category or profile. Plans can be tracked and rescheduled on an ongoing basis depending upon case progress, and a running schedule can be maintained for all hearings and events regarding the case. The status of each case can be monitored via a case dashboard, which allows for easy detection of delays, and generates overall performance data for a particular court with respect to progress and disposal of cases. E-filing systems can also
be created to allow many judicial processes to be completed digitally rather than requiring the physical presence of the parties involved.

A system of this nature is designed to be inclusive, drawing in judges, litigants, advocates, police, jail authorities and citizens to allow for smoother functioning and to correct inequalities in information distribution. It will also allow for systematic case planning, help to save time by more efficient planning of court hearings, reduce the time spent in looking for case-related material, aid in the decision-making process, improve accountability and decrease delays across multiple departments and institutions, and most importantly, make the justice system more citizen-friendly.

Technology-based judicial reform efforts have been undertaken in India, but their implementation continues to be limited at best. For example, the chief justice of India had called for the creation of a planning and management system for the judiciary; in response, the National Judicial Academy presented to a group of judges in Bhopal in 2008 a plan for what they called an ‘Information Management System for Administration of Justice’ (IMAJ), a system that would function much like the judicial platform we have discussed earlier; this proposal did not move beyond the planning stage. In 2011, the government approved the creation of the National Mission for Justice Delivery and Legal Reforms, envisioned as a sweeping overhaul designed to render the judicial process both fast and fair.
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An e-courts project has also been established to help digitize judicial processes,
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but the ambitious goals outlined by such initiatives still remain distant. In 2008, Nandan himself had met with Dr Mohan Gopal, then the director of the National Judicial Academy, as well as with a Supreme Court judge to discuss the implementation of a centralized courts management system, but the initiative did not take off.

Governments around the world are creating new types of institutions that allow their judicial systems to function more efficiently. In the United States, for example, the Administrative Office (AO) of
the United States Courts was set up as far back as 1939 to handle all the support functions that are part of the legal process. The AO now provides lawyers, public administrators, accountants, systems engineers, analysts, statisticians and other staff as needed—in effect, the routine tasks needed for frictionless functioning of the courts have been outsourced to such organizations (although they are still part of the government), leaving the courts free to concentrate on their fundamental purpose of delivering justice.
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India desperately needs the services of a similar organization to reduce the inordinate burden crippling our courts. We propose a road map towards building a better judicial system through the creation of a centralized court operation platform, an entity that will drive the transformation towards completely paperless justice delivery. All documents and evidence will be digitized and easily searchable, and the progress of a given case through the courts can be monitored, allowing for better case tracking and performance management. Some of this data can be made available for public analysis so that trends can be mined to improve the overall functioning of courts. The centralized platform should also allow stakeholders to enrol at their own pace, phasing out paper-based systems in a controlled manner.

We envision that a National Information Utility—the National Judicial Network (NJN)—would be the most desirable organizational model to build and oversee such a platform. The judiciary guards its independence fiercely, and the structure and functioning of the NJN must completely protect that independence. For instance, the NJN can operate under the aegis of the Supreme Court, much like the National Judicial Academy currently does, and its funding can come entirely from the allocated court budgets. The stakeholders that have a say in the functioning of the NJN should be those institutions that would be the prime users of its services, namely the law ministry, the Supreme Court and the High Courts.

To effectively handle its mandate, the NJN would need the services of both legal experts and technologists, each with a working knowledge of the other’s domain so that processes can be simplified while still adhering to the letter of the law. Today, judges have to preside over
complex cases involving environmental disputes and patent litigation, which cover multiple fields of scientific and legal expertise. Rather than expecting judges to educate themselves in all these fields, the NJN should recruit experts in these areas, who can bring their diversity of training and experience to bear on the judicial process, reducing the burden of knowledge on a single individual in the system.