Tribunals form an integral part of the Indian justice system. Their failure to achieve the objective of efficient dispute resolution has led to widespread recognition of the need for administrative reforms of tribunals. The Union Government has attempted to achieve this by passing rules to rationalise and consolidate tribunal administration, but these attempts have been the subject of numerous challenges in the Supreme Court of India. Over the course of these challenges, the idea of creating a ‘National Tribunals Commission’ (NTC) to independently appoint, supervise, and administer tribunals has emerged as a solution.
Structure
- NTC will oversee tribunals and all their benches at the national and state levels made under the laws of the Parliament.
- There should be State Tribunals Commissions in each state for oversight of state level tribunals created under the laws of that state.
- Where Tribunals do not have the critical mass of cases to justify a state-level tribunals commission for each in a group of states, a Joint Tribunals Commission can be set up
Legal Framework
- The NTC should be headed by a Board, composed of diverse stakeholders headed by the Chairperson.
- A Chief Executive Officer, responsible to the Board, would manage and execute the functions of the NTC a day-to-day basis.
- A Secretariat to enable separation of judicial and administrative functions, with functional and/or territorial distribution of work
NTC as an Independent Institution
- Qualification and appointments of tribunal members
- Conducting disciplinary proceedings Identifying and addressing systemic issues in the tribunal system through judicial impact assessments
- Monitoring and evaluating the performance of individual tribunals.
Significance of NTC:
- A key rationale for demanding the NTC is the need for an authority to support uniform administration across all tribunals.
- The NTC could therefore pave the way for the separation of the administrative and judicial functions carried out by various tribunals.
- A ‘corporatised’ structure of NTC with a Board, a CEO and a Secretariat will allow it to scale up its services.
- It could thus provide requisite administrative support to all tribunals across the country.