Law Minister, Veerappa Moily’s ambitious plans of reducing the pendency of court cases in India and creating 15,000 additional judges’ posts in India seems to be taking shape with two new all-India services. The Indian Judicial Service (IJS) and the Indian Legal Service (ILS) aims to meet the demand for services of legal professionals from various departments of the Union and State governments.

The Law Minister promised the establishment of two all-India services - IJS and ILS - aiming at capacity building at the lower levels of judiciary and to provide professional legal advice to various departments.

The appointment of 15,000 posts of judges creating the IJS, for two years facilitate to tackle the huge backlog of nearly 2.5 crore cases pending in the trial courts. Talking about the need for ILS, the Law Minister further added that there was lack of professional legal hands in various departments of the State as well as Central Government when it comes to seeking legal opinion on various day-to-day issues.

Even though, the Centre has the Attorney General, Solicitor General and a team of Additional Solicitors Generals and State has the Advocate General and a team of legal professionals to seek opinion on complex and constitutional issues, they hardly have time to give opinions on all issues as they need to attend the Court daily. Hence, establishment of an all-India legal service would fill the void.

The National Litigation Policy unveiled by the Law Ministry had aimed to reduce average pendency time from 15 years to 3 years. This also includes identifying ‘bottlenecks’ and removing unnecessary Government cases as the Government is identified as one of the biggest contributor to the number of pending cases in the country. Let’s hope that the introduction of these two new services would alleviate these pendencys’.