Highlights of the report
- Police
- Only 6.4 percent of the police force has been provided in-service training for dealing with the public
- All states and union territories failed in achieving representation of their respective diversity quotas for Schedule Tribes, Scheduled Castes and Other Backward Classes.
- They fell short on religious minority diversities: between 1999 – 2013 the Muslim representation in the police has remained consistently low at 3-4 percent including in Jammu and Kashmir where it is only 9 percent as against the 14.2 percent Muslim population
- Women are poorly represented in the police force and constitute only 7 percent of the total of 2.4 million police personnel in the country.
- Across the country, 47,557 police personnel protect 14,842 VIPs.
- There are 15,488 police stations in India of which 9,932 serve the rural population and 5,036 serve the urban population.
- One urban police station covers between 33,000 people (in Odisha) and 2, 40,000 people (in Gujarat). On the other hand, one rural police station covers between 30,500 people (in Telangana) and 2, 33,000 people (in West Bengal).
- Prisons
- Prisons in India are overcrowded with a 114 percent occupancy rate. 17 out of 36 state and union territories have prison occupancy of 100 percent.
- Overcrowding in prisons is due to the fact that nearly 68 percent of under-trials (as of December 2016) are “waiting for investigation, inquiry or trialâ€. With 180 percent occupancy, Delhi prisons are most occupied.
- 95,366 inmates are being handled by one sanctioned correctional staff in Uttar Pradesh.
- 19 out of 35 states and union territories spent on an average Rs 2,500 per month per inmate on food, clothing, medical, vocation and welfare activities.
- India ranked 15th out of 217 countries in under-trial incarceration.
- There are only 621 correctional staff across India’s 1421 prisons.
- Judiciary
- Subordinate courts in India have pendency of 28 million cases – out of which 2.3 million cases have been pending for more than 10 years and 6.7 million cases for more than five years.
- Bihar, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Gujarat, Meghalaya, Tripura, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Jharkhand are the states which have more than 20 percent pendency of cases for over five years in the subordinate courts.
- The representation of women in the lower judiciary accounts for 28 percent and 12 percent at the high court level. “… the actual presence of women in state judiciaries is underwhelming,” says the report.
- Seven states and one union territory were found to have no women judges in their high court benches.
- Not a single high court or state's subordinate judiciary had reached its sanctioned judicial posts.
- At an all-India level, there is just one subordinate court judge for over 50,000 people in 27 states and union territories.
- If all the vacant seats in the judiciary are filled than there would be a shortfall of 4,071 court halls across India.
- If a state disposes of at least as many cases as it receives in a year then it would not be adding to its pending workload. Only five high courts have managed this – Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Odisha, Himachal Pradesh and Tripura. At the subordinate level, the states of Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat cleared as many cases in a year as the numbers that came in.
- The state of Uttar Pradesh had the lowest clearance rate, with 90.48 percent cases pending for the last five years or more in the subordinate courts.
- Legal aid
- As per the present mandate of the legal aid system about 80 percent of the Indian population is eligible to avail free legal services.
- Since 1995, only 15 million people have been provided legal services and advice by the legal aid services authorities established at the national, state, district and sub-divisional levels.
- There were 664 district legal services authorities and 2,254 sub-divisional/taluka legal services committees (as in 2017)
- Tripura, West Bengal, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh are states that are yet to establish district legal services authorities in all their judicial districts.
- There is only one legal aid clinic for every 1,603 villages in Uttar Pradesh.
- India has about five legal aid lawyers per 1,00,000 population where the per capita public spending on legal aid is only Rs 0.75 paise per annum
- In 2017-2018, a total of 7.85 million cases were disposed of countrywide by lok adalats. Out of this, 5.92 million cases were disposed of by the national lok adalats and 1.93 million cases were disposed of by lok adalats held by the state legal services authorities.
- No state or union territory for which data is available used up its entire funds provided by the National Legal Services Authority.
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