Courts Surveyed

• This survey is by no means a comprehensive assessment of the state of infrastructure of the subordinate judiciary in India. Rather, it is an evaluation of only the district court complexes in each state. Judicial infrastructure includes entire layers of courts above and below district court complexes, which were not studied. The decision to survey only district court complexes was based on two reasons. Firstly, logistical constraints prevented undertaking a pan-India survey of all court complexes in the subordinate judiciary. Secondly, a comprehensive list of all subordinate courts was not available.
• The e-courts website lists 647 district courts in the country. However, a on-site study found as many as665 districts that had a district court complex. As a result, efforts were made to survey all these court complexes found in the on-site study. Some court complexes could not be surveyed due to various reasons, and are listed below. As a clarification, however, neither the High Court websites nor the Department of Justice, Ministry of Law and Justice, provided a consolidated list of all district court complexes in the country, there is no way to confirm whether this is an exhaustive list of all court complexes.
• The following district court complexes could not be surveyed:- Alirajpur (Madhya Pradesh), Muzaffarnagar (Uttar Pradesh), Ri-Bhoi & South Garo Hills (Meghalaya), Lower Dibang Valley (Arunachal Pradesh), Dhalai, Khowai, and Sepahijala (Tripura).
• District court complexes that could not be surveyed have been assigned the lowest score for the purpose of overall analysis.

Survey Related

• The survey was designed on the basis of the NCMS guidelines, which was published in 2012, and is treated as the baseline for the design of district court infrastructure.
• The survey questions were divided into six parts. These were: Entry to Court Complex, Court Building. Waiting Areas, Courtrooms, Amenities and Transportation & Access.
• The data collected has been grouped to capture a litigant’s experience through a court complex. These are: Getting There, Navigation, Waiting Areas, Hygiene, Barrier-Free Access, Case Display, Amenities, Security and Websites. Additionally, although specific questions were included to assess the facilities available in courtrooms, given in most cases, only 5% or 10% of courtrooms in the entire court complex were surveyed, this data was not included in the final analysis.
• The NCMS report provides additional standards to be followed for the infrastructure of judges’ chambers, facilities for advocates such as bar rooms, libraries, infrastructure for computerisation, video conferencing facilities, and so on. However, these additional facilities were not examined for the present survey for two reasons. Firstly, the survey sought to understand the particular challenges that litigants and the general public face in accessing justice. Secondly, field researchers could only access spaces open to public and thus made their observations without disturbing the functioning of the court proceedings. This meant that no court staff were interviewed, and no spaces that require prior permission for use were accessed.
• Field researchers were trained in a manner to ensure that data entry would be uniform, but manual errors cannot be ruled out. A monitoring mechanism was also developed to check the quality of data entry, but given the scale of the project, it was not feasible to verify every entry across 665 district court complexes surveyed.
• Gathering user feedback from litigants was an important component of the study. But only ten litigants per district court complex were interviewed due to logistical and time constraints. While this number does not do justice to the high volume of litigants that engage with the judicial system in India everyday, these interviews are a representative sample and offer a panoramic view of user concerns while accessing district court complexes. This has resulted in some of the responses being influenced by the interests of the section of litigants interviewed and thereby limited to what perceive as necessary for their interests.
• Gathering user feedback from litigants was an important component of the study. But only ten litigants per district court complex were interviewed due to logistical and time constraints. While this number does not do justice to the high volume of litigants that engage with the judicial system in India everyday, these interviews are a representative sample and offer a panoramic view of user concerns while accessing district court complexes. This has resulted in some of the responses being influenced by the interests of the section of litigants interviewed and thereby limited to what perceive as necessary for their interests.
• Using the NCMS report as the baseline for evaluating court infrastructure itself was a limitation. The NCMS guidelines were prepared in 2012, and was written without adequate acknowledgement of the Indian Universal Design Principles drafted in 2011. In 2016, the Ministry of Urban Development issued guidelines for persons with disability and elderly persons for accessing public buildings which were in line with the Universal Design Principles, and which could be arguably considered as an upgraded code for public space design. But these newer guidelines are designed for a technical audience, and the field researchers team engaged for this project were not equipped to carry out such assessments. For instance, even though the survey assessed whether ramps/lifts, braille, tactile pavements and washrooms for persons with disabilities are present, the exact measurements, dimensions, slope of the ramps or area of the lift, was beyond the scope of the survey.
• Using the NCMS report as a benchmark has other concerns, too. The NCMS report is a vision document in many ways, and lists out the essential features of what its authors consider to be an ideal court complex. However, practically all the court complexes surveyed have been in existence for decades, well before the NCMS report was conceived of or written.
• Finally, the data on physical infrastructure of district court complexes was collected between May 2018 and August, 2018. The data on pendency of cases was extracted between 18.09.2018 and 25.09.2018 and the data on vacancy of judges was extracted from the Court News publication as available on 31.12.2017. These dates were hard stops for the data entry portal. The authors acknowledge that this data, would have changed substantially since the time of its extraction.

State data related

Maps and Icons

• The maps have been sourced from DataMeet, available at http://datameet.org/, and the icons have been extracted from the Noun Project, available at https://thenounproject.com/.
• For all state map related disclaimers, please refer to state reports.
• We express no opinion on the political boundaries of the maps and are making no claims as to the legal status of any state, district, city or area.