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Sunday, Jun 20, 2004

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National

Village-level conciliation boards to ease burden on courts

By Malabika Bhattacharya

KOLKATA, JUNE 19. The Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee Government has unveiled an initiative to stop the choking of the Kolkata High Court and other subsidiary courts in West Bengal by setting up village-level conciliation boards under the panchayat system.

Law Department officials said on Thursday that the Government hoped to place the West Bengal Block-level Conciliation Board Bill in the coming session of the Assembly to enact legislation for the purpose.

"We are witnessing every day how a large number of cases that need not have reached a law court are choking the judicial system. The salishi sabhas or the conciliation boards we have in mind will seek to act as a human filter. Many cases, according to our experiences, can be solved outside the court,'' a law department official said.

The State Law Minister, Nishith Adhikari, one of the prime forces behind the initiative, is pushing for a durable means of settlement of legal disputes without taking the same to a law court. "We want to create a means, not an alternative to a law court. Our aim is to create a channel of conciliation for the poor and the downtrodden in rural Bengal who cannot, in the ordinary run of things, take recourse to the law for want of money."

"They are lying," said Amiya Chattopadhyay, chairman, West Bengal Bar Council. "The current move is aimed at politicising the judicial system at the grassroots. The ruling Leftists want to interfere in the process of justice," he alleged.

On Friday, the Bar Council met over the draft Bill and discussed how it could be stopped from becoming a law. One of the options examined was going for a long strike by advocates who had blocked the Government's efforts one-and-half years ago to increase court fees.

Broadly, the Government's thinking is to allow a panchayat samity of a block to set up a Salishi Board in consultation with the State's legal services authority. Each board will constitute of an arbiter, a law adviser and a councillor, each to be appointed for a period of two years. The panchayat samity can remove a member from a Salishi Board on such grounds as low attendance, poor health conditions, being of unsound mind, abuse of office and moral degeneration.

In other words, a board will be entirely controlled by the panchayat samity. Its functions will relate to settling conjugal problems and disputes, village-level non-criminal issues and so on.

However, the board will not be made an obligatory forum for a prospective litigant. The legislation will allow him to bypass the board and move one of the established courts direct. But a court can always refer a case to the Salishi board if it so desired.

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