Parameters to Measure Court Performance

Pendency and disposal rates are the most commonly used measures of court performance, in India. While these measures are relevant to the justice system for efficient allocation of resources, they provide little information to litigants, a key stakeholder in the justice system. An evaluation of the justice system based on the outcomes it delivers to litigants, will help enable better litigant decision-making.

We comprehensively reviewed the existing global literature to identify the measures of court performance that will be relevant to a litigant. Measures such as efficiency, effectiveness, fairness, predictability, and access are outcomes of court performance that is crucial for a litigant. We demonstrate these measures by using,

• Survival analysis on quantifiable data from the websites of three courts in Mumbai: the Bombay High Court, the National Company Law Tribunal, and the Debt Recovery Tribunal.

• A perception survey administered to frequent users of these courts.

This work holds the potential to evaluate the performance and drive improvements in the outcomes of the justice system, and enhance the quality of information available to litigants.

This measurement framework can be used as a base for evaluating disputes in courts, of all types. The data collection tools, and survey instruments built can be used by researchers to study debt enforcement in other jurisdictions, beyond Mumbai.