Kerala Tips

Chief Justice of India K.G. Balakrishnan declared Cheriyanad Panchayat as the first litigation controlled Panchayat on saturday. The Pachayat at Cheriyanad has setup local level committee  to facilitate out of the court settlements whenever disputes arise in the village. The committee was very successful in minimizing the litigations from the Panchayat disposing over 400 petitions locally in the last year!

In order to understand the significance of such dispute resolution mechanisms, we need to look at our current judicial system. There are over 35,000,000 pending cases before Indian courts and the number is always increasing. Supreme court alone has over 45,000 cases pending before it. Shockingly, year to year increase in filing of cases is over 20%. Statistically this means that every 5 out of 100 people are involved in some kind of litigation!!

The sad reality is that people go to litigation even for trivial disputes, there by increasing the load on the judicial system. They don’t realize the cost of money and time wasted in the long term. Setting up local Panchayat level committees is a good step in reducing the litigations.

Now there are risks also in such committees. One obvious problem is the corrupt politicians who are looking for any opportunity to take advantage of. I think this is a good idea as long as these committees are informal in nature and is used in a good way to reach settlement for disputes. Kerala government Web site has an article on the Cheriyanad experiment and provides insight on the modus operandi of the village court,

In the beginning, the Panchayat president was the chairman of the village court. The vice-president and ward members are the members. Later it was developed and strengthened by including a retired superintendent of police, who is also a legal expert, retired BDO, a college lecturer, a social worker and two standing committee members of the Panchayat. The fact that more than 160 disputes were settled within two years was a striking proof of the ability of the leadership as well as the transparency in the functioning of the system. Thus, Cheriyanad became a glorious symbol of the concept of “court in to people” rather than “people in to court”. Disputes, which were supposed to be settled only through legal courts and those to be filed in courts, were successfully settled in village courts.

Petitions received at the Panchayat office will be recorded in the register by the clerk. The next step is to send notices to the clients concerned. If a client fails to attend the village court, he will be informed again. Only in one case, the client decided to keep himself away, despite repeated notices.

If someone can destroy this model, it will be politicians.

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