Despite India's meteoric growth in last couple of decades, there is very little evidence to believe that the country has successfully eradicated the fundamental challenges such as illiteracy, hunger, poor health care and inadequate infrastructure to least a few. Government and political parties often describe the issues in their partisan way, claiming some exaggerated figures of success and blaming lack of resources to achieve anything better. Experts have always challenged this assertion and blamed the administration for high-level of corruption and inadequate accountability as some of the key reasons for failure. I would add here that a very poor legal infrastructure is a key factor contributing to this mess.
Over the last two decades, liberalization coupled with a focus on reducing license raj has helped the country to grow at a faster pace allowing the economy to break away from the historical Gandhi rate of growth. Consequently the government has collected more tax income which translated to new projects in education, health care and infrastructure which were considered priorities. Even though visible progress has been made in most of these areas, the country is far behind other developing and BRIC nations. One thing which however has barely made any progress and that is our Legal system. Millions of cases both in civil and criminal courts pending over more than 10 years have created a huge logjam and ensured that "going to court" to address an issue is practically not an option for majority of common people. This lack of faith in the system has forced citizens to take the law to their own hands and this has resulted in unavoidable anarchy all across the country.
Recently Tata had to move the production of it's small car Nano from West Bengal because of months of violent protest. Administration at state and central level allowed the opposition to take it's own course without any interventions. Courts were never involved, because neither the protesters nor the government believed that there is any value in bringing this up to the constitution. I was really astonished by the prolong drag of negotiations followed by violence which ultimately forces Tata to exit.
At any day, newspapers in India would have stories about mass protests and in many cases even violent opposition to some kind of projects. It can be a new manufacturing plant in Orissa or modernizations of airports or any other large projects. In a smaller scale also petty crimes such as forcible collection of rent, extraction of money from non-paying credit card holders and many other instances of people assuming the power of a police are quite commonplace.
I think it is high time, government takes immediate actions to modernize the archaic justice system and get rid of all the pending cases. This would allow citizens to use court as a medium to address their grievances and discourage them from indulging into violence. At the same time, criminals or other law-breakers will also have enough disincentives to indulge in illegal activities.
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