Centre, SC working on system to cut court case pendency: Amit Shah
Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Friday said the Centre is working with the Supreme Court on a new system to reduce the pendency of
Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Friday said the Centre is working with the Supreme Court on a new system to reduce the pendency of cases in the apex court and high courts, and to ensure timely justice. He said the government was determined to prevent delays in the criminal justice system and linked this effort to the three new criminal laws introduced by the Modi government. Read Full Story Shah also said timely justice would depend on better investigation and stronger use of technology. He asked police and forensic experts to collect evidence accurately at crime scenes, ensure it is "not contaminated", file chargesheets on time, follow up with prosecutors and pursue cases in court for quicker decisions. Speaking at the inauguration of the All India Fingerprint Conference-2026 organised by the Crime Records Bureau in New Delhi, Shah said, "We identified the loopholes (in the old criminal laws) and 90 per cent of the law-based ones have been addressed. The Union home ministry is actively engaged with the Supreme Court for creating a new system to address volume-based delays in the high courts and the Supreme Court." He told police and forensic experts from across the country that the criminal justice system must work in a way that delivers timely justice to people.
He said converting information and data into intelligence was important, and cited the Mahabharata, saying Lord Krishna played this role and helped the Pandavas defeat the numerically superior Kauravas. Shah said data gathered from crime scenes should be analysed using artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to identify crime patterns so that crimes can be pre-empted and criminals caught quickly. The home minister said a modus operandi bureau, which he had suggested within the NCRB four years ago, should now begin work to study crime patterns, repeat offenders, and interstate and international criminal networks. He also stressed that the Automated Fingerprint Identification System should be used more widely and its database expanded with fingerprints collected from crime scenes. "There are numerous such cases where NAFIS has been of great help in simplifying even the most complex cases. But I still believe that NAFIS is being utilised only 10 per cent of the time. NAFIS should not be used just for finding criminals, it can succeed only when you enrich the NAFIS data through fingerprints obtained from every crime scene," Shah said.
He added that it was a two-way system that was very useful in proving the criminal, but the crime could be proven only when data was generated. Shah said the country was going through a phase of transformation in the criminal justice system. "When it comes to the criminal justice system, our country is going through a phase of transformation. In the old days, the police station was considered a tool to maintain law and order. If there was a dispute anywhere, the station house officer would resolve the matter; otherwise, it would go to court, and cases would remain pending for years on end," he said. He added that the time had come to make the criminal justice system a suitable means for every citizen to obtain the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. He also stressed the need for training in the use of tools provided under the new criminal laws so that only necessary and essential evidence was included in chargesheets to establish the role of an accused person.
The BriefWire