Goa has ranked seventh among seven small states in the India Justice Report 2022, brought out with the aim of regularly tracking improvements and persisting deficits in each state’s structural and financial capacity to deliver justice based on quantitative measurements of budgets, human resources, infrastructure, workload, and diversity across police, judiciary, prisons and legal aid for all 36 states and UTs.
The report released by the Tata Trusts in April 2023, has been prepared with the collaboration of several organisations, such as the Commonwealth Human Rights Institute, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Common Cause, Centre for Social Justice and Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy among others.
In preparing the report, the organisations have drawn primarily from authoritative Government sources, which includes the data on police organization from the Bureau of Police Research and Development, various reports of the National Crime Records Bureau, the National Legal Services Authority, the Law Commission, Comptroller and Auditor General of India, Model Prison Manual of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, Supreme Court of India Conference Proceedings of National Initiative to Reduce Pendency and Delay in Judicial System, 2018, Lok Sabha Replies – Budget Session 2020 and National Court Management Systems Committee. The report has assessed each states’ performance at the level of police, prisons, judiciary and legal aid.
What brought Goa to the rank of seventh among seven small states? At the first instance, it needs to be clarified that this is the cumulative rank. The performance ranks seventh in so far as prisons and judiciary are concerned, sixth as regards police, and second as regards legal aid.
In the matter of diversity, Goa stood sixth. The diversity aspect was considered from the lens of gender, scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other backward classes. This may not even reflect the entire picture, as the report itself claims in its introduction, that ‘official data also restricts itself to assessing caste and gender more readily at the lower echelons rather than parsing it across all levels of the hierarchy’.
Goa would stand still worse on the diversity criterion, if the higher ranks of persons in police, prisons, judiciary and State Human Rights Commissions were considered, and also if enumeration of religious, language or regional diversities were to be considered. There are 100% vacancies for Scheduled Castes, 67% vacancies for Scheduled Tribes and 85% vacancies for Other Backward Classes, against the sanctioned strength of one for Scheduled Castes, six for Scheduled Tribes and 14 for Other Backward Classes.
In so far as gender diversity is concerned, the percentage of women in the police staff is 10.6%, in police officers 15.6%, in prison staff 1.8% and 12.1% in the High Court. Goa fares relatively well but still falls short with percentage of women lawyers empanelled for legal aid, being 45.3%. No doubt Goa shines when it comes to recruitment of judicial officers, with 70% percent women. In so far as empanelment of para legal volunteers is concerned, there has been a satisfactory recruitment in terms of gender diversity with the percentage standing at 59.3%. But one wonders if this is more in keeping with gender stereotypes, where volunteer unpaid or low-paid work is considered a natural extension of women’s work (the way it has been with anganwadi workers), and therefore payable less, despite the fact that the work calls not for just volunteers but full-time staff.
The report has also looked at performance from the point of unfilled vacancies. Goa had 17.2% vacancies in the posts of police constables as of January 2022, 23.6% in the posts of police officers, 29.8% in the posts of High Court Judges as of December 2022, 20% vacancies in the posts of Subordinate Judges as of July 2022, 11.3% in the posts of High Court staff, 29.6% vacancies in the posts of prison officers as of December 2021, 31.5% in cadre staff, 84.6% in prison medical staff, 83.3 % in prison medical officers – all as of December 2021.
In so far as cases in subordinate courts in Goa are concerned, the cases pending for more than five years in subordinate courts increased in Goa from 13.6% to 23.9%. The number of cases pending in the High Court of Bombay at Goa is not available in the Report as the calculation has been cumulatively done for all the cases pending before the High Court of Bombay at its various locales.
Multiple Ministry of Home Affairs advisories reportedly recommend three women sub-inspectors and ten women constables for each police station, but Goa does not meet this mark. In fact, this writer has found that sometimes one police sub-inspector has been posted at one police station and is also holding charge for another police station.
The Goa police budget of Rs 2.27 crore allocated for training for the year 2020-2021, was not even completely utilised. This money could well be utilized for investigating cyber-documentation. As a matter of fact, with the increase in complaints of cyber-crimes, the police should have been appropriately equipped. But the police have been incompetent to deal with complaints of identity thefts and illegal surveillance. Therefore, it is necessary that the police revisit the training budget at least in terms of quality and composition, if not quantity.
Goa did not provide information about compliance of Supreme Court Guidelines as regards installation of CCTV cameras and surveillance. Understandably so. CCTV cameras have been found to be not working in some police stations, due to which police have acted with impunity and valuable evidence has been lost.
Goa spent 19.2 less on the prison budget between 2015-16 and 2020-21. There were 100 % vacancies in the posts of Correctional staff in the prisons, without whom, the chances of reformation of prisoners is poor.
The number of para-legal volunteers came down to 3.8 per lakh population, and Goa cleared the least number of cases in Lok Adalat at 6%. The Lok Adalats awarded the least amount of compensation at only Rs 2,50,000 against 34 applications that were decided. Only 49% of the National Legal Services Authority Funds were utilised.
At the Goa Human Rights Commission also, vacancies were reported in the office. Just now there are 100% vacancies in the posts of Chairman and members of the Commission, It is not known why when the term of the Commission/members expires, there is no prompt reconstitution of the Commission, causing a gap in the redressal of human rights violations. There can be no justification for neglect of human rights violations.
(Albertina Almeida is a lawyer and human rights activist)
