Calculating judges’ strength in india

Adequate judge strength is essential for an effective judiciary. With cases constantly being filed in all tiers of the judiciary, it is important that the requisite judicial strength be available to tackle the caseload. While dealing with the basic question of how many judges do we need, several countries have devised methods to determine the optimal strength of the judiciary. This paper highlights the limitations that inherently exist in each of the models that have been proposed in the past, and proposes a time-based weighted caseload model as the best approach towards judge strength calculation. The weighted caseload model is in use in many countries. Several countries in Europe and the United States of America (USA) have modelled the weighted caseload method as per their needs. However, applying the method without contextualizing it to the Indian scenario will not fetch the right results. We must take into account case-related and judge related aspects existing in the Indian scenario.