• The Supreme Court sits in final judgment over decisions not only of the high courts in the states but also over a hundred tribunals, central and state, functioning throughout India.
• As per Article 141, the law declared by the Supreme Court, its pronouncements on the constitutional validity of enacted law are binding on all other courts and authorities in the country
• There is virtually no area of legislative or executive activity which is beyond the Supreme Court’s scrutiny.
• However, empowering itself with the trappings of modern technology, India’s Supreme Court has been striving to perform its arduous task.

Challenges of Indian Judiciary

• Law commission has submitted more than 200 reports on Judicial governance.
• A bench of three justices of the Supreme Court had drawn up a fine blueprint:
• On case management
• On how to make recent amendments in the procedural laws work on the ground.
• In the Salem Advocate Bar Association case, the justices had requested the high courts to implement the detailed blueprint. But most of them have not.
• However, they could not direct the high courts to do so because under the Indian constitution, the High courts are autonomous constitutional bodies not subject to administrative directions of the Supreme Court.
• It is in the high courts that there are now left the largest number of roadblocks and delays.
• In their administrative functioning, the high courts are answerable to no one but themselves.

Example of the United States

• In the United States, under the Judicial Councils Act, of 1980, judicial independence has been undertaken by the judges.
• The Act confers powers on bodies comprised of judges to take such action against a federal judge “as is appropriate, short of removal.”
• Judicial independence, protected by Article III of the US Constitution, was meant “to insulate judges from interference from other branches of government — not from oversight by other judges”.
• However, in India, citizens need the reassurance of a system of judicial accountability.
• Judicial accountability is a remedial mechanism which will protect the higher judiciary from some of its own members who have gone astray.

Suggestions for Indian Judiciary

• The judiciary as an institution needs to preserve its independence.
• To do this, it must strive to maintain the confidence of the public in the established courts.
• The independence of judges is best safeguarded by the judges themselves through institutions that the law empowers them to set up to preserve the image of a higher judiciary.
• It is time that the Supreme Court be entrusted with direct responsibility for the functioning of the high courts:
• Only then can the highest court be an effective apex court,
• Only then can the Supreme Court be made answerable for judicial governance for the entire country.
• Judicial governance means that all judges who are constitutionally entrusted with the responsibility of protecting the rights of citizens must also be seen to be persons of rectitude.
• Judges must make annual financial disclosure statements, not privately to their respective chief justices, but publicly.
• It is done by justices of the Supreme Court in the world’s oldest democracy, the US.
• All such disclosure statements of its judges be made and then also published in India.

An independent judiciary is necessary for a free society and a constitutional democracy. It ensures the rule of law and realization of human rights and also the prosperity and stability of a society. Judges are the at the forefront of judicial independence and thus judges must set an example for ministers, central and state, for members of Parliament and of state legislatures, and for all high officials of government, to follow.