Alternate Dispute Resolution System in India: A Critical Analysis

Abstract

The accessibility to justice can be described as a point of differentiation between humans and animals. A society can never be sustained in the absence of justice, nor can its inhabitants reach justice. There has always been a challenge for the state in every democratic setting to protect and maintain the fundamental rights of the individual as a duty under the well-known concept of the "social contract." The inability of states to secure justice has resulted in serious consequences throughout history. From the Mahabharata and Attic tragedies to Kafka and his successors' works, literary texts have frequently shown how human subjects are handled in relation to justice—as decisionmakers, interlocutors, dispensers, or victims1. Since holding an individual away from justice has always been the root cause of revolution throughout history, the importance of the justice administration system cannot be overstated. India has followed Anglo- Saxon jurisprudence, which recognises the adversarial structure as a fundamental component of justice administration. So, in the event of a dispute, the courts using the adversarial method are the only remedy. It is impossible to deny that the reputation of India's justice administration system has been eroding in recent years. The adversarial nature of the system, combined with the high cost of legal services; slow functioning of the justice administration, with a mounting backlog and indescribable delays in resolving disputes, are among the major causes responsible for the loss of judicial credibility to some extent, as these factors generate a great sense of disappointment and helplessness in the common citizen. This begs the question of whether we should have multiple doors courts or some other type of structure to help the adversarial court system. This question gets to the heart of the problem, which is how solid the base of the justice system is. The Indian adjudication system has been plagued by the issue of not providing justice in relation to the number of cases filed. The number of cases pending in Indian courts continues to grow by the day. According to the Law Commission of India2, after the adoption of the Indian Constitution, the state's ever-expanding activities, a rapid phase of urbanisation, large-scale migration of people, and increased knowledge of rights have all contributed to a considerable increase in the judicial system's workload. However, the method continues to work without much improvement, devoid of new management strategies and technical developments, none of which has kept neither of which has kept pace with the increase in the workload. A society that fails to provide justice and violates the necessity of ensuring fair access to justice for everyone is bound to cause discontent among its citizens, resulting in a loss of reputation and, inevitably, the risk of losing some of its legitimacy. In India, apart from litigants who go to Court solely to obstruct access to justice, some still choose to avoid the adversarial Court system, which takes countless years and incurs exorbitant costs in the majority of cases. According to one calculation, the final disposition of all pending cases in India will take at least 324 years.3