[Answered] What do you understand by ‘basic procedural justice’? Discuss how India as a society failed to deliver ‘basic procedural justice’ especially to poor and weaker sections?

Basic procedural justice is an elementary form of justice that involves fair procedures to provide justice to the victims. Procedural justice is the idea of fairness in the processes that resolve disputes and allocate resources. Procedural justice concerns the fairness and the transparency of the processes by which decisions are made, and may be contrasted with distributive justice. Unfortunately justice in India is being flawed in many instances, especially for weak and poor people.

Poor basic procedural justice in India:

1. Miscarriages of justice run the entire gamut of the criminal justice system in India. Be it the police, investigators, advocates, media, even the judiciary, the weak and powerless find the system stacked against them.
2. Filing an FIR is a struggle. Evidence is often tampered with, either deliberately or through callousness.
3. The judiciary too is losing credibility. By the time the acquittal occurs, many years is being passed, and an innocent person’s life, and reputation are ruined.
4. Victims of crimes who are prosecuted don’t get justice fast enough, if at all. While people implicated in cases or facing trial have the constitutional right to defend themselves; those rights are routinely negated.
5. People look up to the judiciary as the last bastion which corrects the wrongs of the executive and legislature. But the biggest area where it has failed is the criminal justice delivery system.
6. Poor people have little or no means to defend themselves, and therefore they become victims of the system.
7. The system is unfairly skewed, a large majority of the Indian population is poor and underprivileged and don’t have access to justice. There are so many cases where the quality of legal representation people receive is pitiable.
8. There’s also inordinate delays in forensic labs sending reports. Forensic labs in our country are limited and terribly overworked. Forensic reports have to be given instantly.

How justice should be ensured to all especially poor?

1. There must be a compulsory departmental enquiry, particularly where acquittals happen and judgments are passed challenging the findings of the investigating team, either on grounds that somebody was framed or some evidence was fabricated. That departmental enquiry report and action taken report must be placed before the court that passed the judgment.
2. Setting up fast-track courts and benches to speed up pending cases.
3. A plan to increase the strength of the judiciary fivefold by expanding recruitments on all levels and ensuring proper training and surveillance of new appointees.
4. Keeping the courts open 365 days a year. This, of course, is a long-term goal but one that needs to be seriously pondered upon.
5. Revision of old laws and regulations. More than a thousand of India’s laws date back to the British Raj, some of which are mere loopholes in the workings of the court and thus must be done away with in order to ensure that justice can be served quickly and effectively.

The mess in the justice system only ends up harming the interests of the nation. That is why it becomes even more important for the government to solve this crisis. The success of Indian democracy, eventually, depends on this crucial intervention.