The High Court in New Delhi is so behind in its work that it could take up to 466 years to clear the enormous backlog, the court’s chief justice said in a damning report that illustrates the decrepitude of India’s judicial system.
The Delhi High Court races through each case in an average of four minutes and 55 seconds but still has tens of thousands of cases pending, including upward of 600 that are more than 20 years old, according to the report.
More than the 466 years, it’s the four minutes and 55 seconds that blows my mind. Imagine—your neighbour steals your ox, and you file a case against him, and it goes to the high court. And then you wait and wait and wait. As science advances, you undergo fancy therapies that slow the aging process. The ox dies. The children of the ox die. Generations of oxen pass on to the great farm in the sky. Your neighbour dies, but you keep his brain preserved in a vat. All your organs give way, but you battle on, kept alive by technology, yet afraid to exhale too hard for fear of causing the final malfunction. And then, finally, after 466 years, in 2475 AD, your case is finally heard.
After four minutes and 55 seconds of deliberations the judge, a GoogRoSoft supercomputer, decides that you have lost. All the witnesses are dead, as is the ox.
“I waited so long for this,” you wheeze. “So long, so long. This is not fair.”
“Well,” says the GoogRoSoft supercomputer, “you can always appeal to the Supreme Court.”
Meanwhile, in the vat, the brain throbs with laughter.
(HT: Reader Dev, who also points me to the Supreme Court’s definition of ‘idiot’. Wonder how long they took to come up with that.)