Govt to improve quality of judiciary, says Moily

"The Government of India would like to improve quality of the judiciary through reforming the legal education. We need to make India the most preferred destination of investment," Law and Justice Minister M Veerappa Moily said on Friday night.

Moily, a former chief minister of Karnataka and Chairman of the Second Administrative Reforms Commission, said: "any investment above Rs five crore will be decided in commercial courts within a year."

He said that the Indian government's first priority is to reform the legal education and upgrade the course contents in the 933 law colleges across the country.

"There are more than one million lawyers in India. We intend to restructure the faculty of our law colleges and make them world class. The second priority for the Government is to strengthen and widen the centres of excellences and establish more National Law Schools, at least one each in each of the 28 States," he said.

Deputy High Commissioner to UK R N Prasad was present along with Moily during his interactions with journalists.

Moily said the Government would like to put in place a legal regulatory regime and an oversight mechanism for the smooth functioning of the judiciary without infringing on the independence of the judiciary.

"In the first stage, with a view to fast track the delivery of justice and creating centres of excellence, we established National Law Schools. Now in the second stage, we would like to introduce the second generation legal reforms. At present litigation in India involves delay of over 15 years. The Government would like to reduce this delay to less than 3 years," he said.

Moily said the Commercial Court Bill would soon become a law, paving the way for speedy disposal of cases through arbitration. Lok Sabha has passed the Bill and it will go before the Rajya Sabha now.

The Minister said the amendment of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act would remove the distractions and make the legislation more vibrant.