SC agrees to examine plea on mandatory pre-litigation mediation

The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to consider a plea for a direction to the government and various High Courts to take appropriate measures to provide for mandatory ‘pre-litigation’ mediation.

The plea also sought guidelines or formulate a Standard Operating Procedure (SoP) to give immediate effect to the functioning of mandatory ‘pre-Litigation mediation’ pan India.

A bench of Chief Justice S A Bobde and Justices A S Bopanna and V Ramasubramanian sought appearance from law officer of the Union government.

The court was also informed that the government was considering legislation on mediation. The bench posted the matter for consideration on March 25.

A plea was filed by Youth Bar Association of India, citing the data issued by the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) that total number of cases pending before the courts is 32.45 million as on May 24, 2020, of which 32 percent cases are less than one year old.

As per the data issued by the NJDG out of total pending cases, 9.114 million are civil cases in which 34.25 per cent cases are one year old; about 44.76 per cent cases are 1-5 years old.

“The aggregate of cases that are 5-10 years old are 14.31 per cent. Disappointingly the category of cases which falls in the range of 20 to 30 years constitute 1.15 per cent of the pendency and 0.37 per cent case are waiting for their disposal for as much as thirty years," said the plea filed through advocate Ajit Sharma.

The petitioner emphasised mediation in general and ‘pre-litigative’ mediation in particular an alternative mode to settle the dispute amicably, and that too, at pre-litigative stage.

“Pre-institutional or to put it differently ‘Pre-litigation’ mediation is nothing but an attempt to resolve the dispute among the parties amicably with the help of neutral third party called Mediator before going to the court or even before filing litigation or sending a notice. It gives a chance to both the parties to end the dispute in a win-win position," the plea said.