The India Justice Report 2022 shows some improvement, but not enough. Its chief editor mentioned India’s commitment to justice for all by 2030 through effective, inclusive and accountable institutions, although the latest report showed that the goal is still a long way off. This is the third IJR and it ranked large and mid-size states with populations of one crore and smaller states according to their achievements in budgets, human resources, infrastructure workload, diversity and trends against their own benchmarks across four ‘pillars’ — the police, judiciary, prisons and legal aid. In the first category, Karnataka heads the list with three other southern states in the top five — it has shown conscious effort — but even then the total picture is far from heartening. Justice can only be meaningful when the poorest and least powerful can expect it. The IJR shows that over 77% of the people in prisons filled to 130% capacity are under-trial prisoners, and in the foreword, the former Chief Justice of India, U.U. Lalit, said that around 70% of litigants in criminal cases are below the poverty line. This is easy to connect with the fact that legal aid clinics have fallen by 44% between 2019 and 2021 even though there is slightly higher expenditure for legal aid. The system is interconnected: under-trial prisoners spend a longer time behind bars, ensuring that the case arrears keep increasing.

Behind this lie fundamental issues of finances and vacancies. Only the Union territories of Delhi and Chandigarh allocate 1% of their annual expenditure to the judiciary. Workloads are unreasonable when there is a 22% vacancy among judges; in high courts it is 30%. Yet the Centre keeps stalling appointments to the higher judiciary. Vacancies plague the police, prison staff and legal aid; 25% of police stations have no CCTV cameras. How is that acceptable? It cannot help the less privileged that just Karnataka has met all quota requirements, but that too only in the police force. Equally problematic is the striking shortage of women across the justice system, especially among prison staff and the police — and the latter after an increase. If the IJR’s facts are the result of a lack of attention, it is strange enough. But do they suggest that governments would rather not have justice for all?