The Crime Scerio

There is a very strong correlation not only between the law’s delay and people taking to crime with impunity, but also between the number of pending cases and the number of crimil cases. As a result of shortages of prosecutors, judges and courts (not to speak of slow procedures), there are more people under trial in India than the entire population of the Netherlands or Kazakhstan. But what is more interesting, perhaps is the proportion of crimil cases to the total number of pending cases. In 2013, the cases of as many as 85 per cent of people put on trial were pending, according to data collected from the tiol Crime Records Bureau. Among the pending cases of the Supreme Court, 19 per cent of the pending cases and 25 per cent of the settled cases are crimil cases. The scerio gets more interesting as we move down the ladder. In the high courts, 23 per cent of the pending cases (a million of them) are crimil cases while 6.9 per cent of the cases settled are crimil cases. In the district and subordite courts, 67 per cent of the pending cases are crimil cases. This is perhaps a clear indication of two things. One is that due to civil cases taking much longer than crimil ones, people have begun to get such cases settled through arbitration rather than going to court. But this is not all that easy in respect of crimil cases. Hence the large proportion of pending cases would have to be crimil cases. Secondly, those who hope to reap advantages by taking the law in their own hands are involved more in heinous crimes rather than offences relating to civil cases. The knowledge that they can postpone punishment by several years (13 years in the Salman Khan hit-and-run case) encourages crimes.