Alternative methods for dispute resolution

CHENNAI: There is an urgent need to strengthen the judicial system and to effectively employ all alternative methods of dispute resolution like arbitration, mediation, conciliation, lok adalat, gram nyayalaya and village panchayat, Supreme Court judge Dalveer Bhandari said here on Saturday.Inaugurating an international conference on ‘Alternative Dispute Resolution - Conciliation and Mediation’, organised by the International Centre for Alternative Dispute Resolution (ICADR) here on Saturday, Justice Bhandari said that the problem of pendency of cases was not soluble in the law courts alone. The problem was so monumental that for effectively dealing with the same, multiple steps had to be taken.   As on March 31, 2011, as many as 2.74 crore cases were pending before the subordinate courts in the country. Over 42.92 lakh cases were pending before the High Courts and 58,000, before the Supreme Court. Realistic evaluation of prevalent condition revealed that the court cases were likely to further increase because of the increasing social awareness, inadequate number of judges and judicial officers, inadequate infrastructural facilities and increased legislative activity.Bhandari said that litigation was not usually designed to create hormony. Ordinarily, litigation breeded bitterness in the mutual relationships of the parties, whereas mediation and conciliation improved the relationship and goodwill between them,  since they themselves reached at a workable solution. P Sathasivam, judge, Supreme Court, said that India had not fully exploited the potential dispute resolution mechanisms like conciliation, mediation and arbitration. If the three mechanisms were  made more efficient, the demand for adjudication in regular courts would definitely decrease. To reap the fruits of ADR mechanism, qualified mediators and conciliators were needed. Necessary awareness must be created, infrastructural facilities improved and more references  made to the ADR process by the regular courts.Madras High Court Chief Justice MY Eqbal said that in the present scenario of globalisation, the biggest challenge the justice delivery  system was facing was the huge backlog of cases and delay in disposal and, as such, survival of the system depended upon timely, cheaper and  fair justice to all and, for this, one had to accept and adopt ADR mechanism to resolve the disputes.Karnataka Governor and ICADR chairman HR Bhardwaj said that the ADR method should be taken at the international level.