THAT's what's wrong!

Once we had mapped the whole system, it was time to start pointing fingers! We had to figure out exactly where and at what point in the system what was going wrong to be able to define our scope (plus, it was high time we brought some colour onto our borin' old newsprint)

If efforts are made to improve the co-ordination between the Police and the Judiciary, the former being a major stakeholder in the system, there will be an improvement in the level of overall efficiency. There must also be interventions to make the filing and processing of information at the Police level faster.

The Government being the biggest litigant is another direction in which one can think; either from the point of view of reducing litigation itself, or else at least baseless appeals which waste the time of the courts.

Can adjournments be controlled if such relevant statistics are briefly highlighted before the judge, so he knows the number of adjournments already taken and decide accordingly? Or may be there's another way to deal with it, but this is another one of those things everyone you speak to about the Judiciary complains about (apart from the other clichéd 'There are very few judges' and 'It's a Government system, nothing can be done about it!')

If the process is sped up from the stage of case classification in the administrative department and the management is improved, may be the effect amplifies by the time it reaches the judgement. Or may be there are other levels of intervention required as well if we're looking at it from the administrative aspect.

We also made a trip to Gandhinagar National law University and spoke to some students and faculty, who gave us helpful insights on which areas we could focus on. Now, this whole thing being as vast a system as it is, we had to take measures to save ourselves from drowning. So, we kept one of our possible directions as 'scope for technological intervention'. After a discussion with Mr. R.K.Singh from GNLU, with this line of thought, we came up with some areas with scope for tangible interventions. Of course, technology is only one area we can look at. There's no reason to restrict ourselves so soon.

So, by far we have pin-pointed some areas inside the system that seemed interesting to work upon. But haven't a lot of people inside the system already done that? There have been countless reports by lawyers and judges who have a clear idea of the working of the system; much more in detail in their own field of work than we could have achieved in these few weeks. They have given well thought-of recommendations to make the system efficient.

So what is it that we are trying to do as designers, that people inside this system themselves can't do as well, or possibly better than us?

Well, studying the system was the beginning, and so was absorbing and contemplating on the obvious. The important part comes now (which is also going to be the more challenging part I'm anticipating), where we do what we're trained to do. Now that we've seen the points of view of all the stake holders, let's take a step back and see the system from the outside, a bit more holistically.