28 January, 2021

India Justice Report: Ranking states on police, judiciary, prisons and legal aid

Access to justice, a public good, is important for all of us. The Tata Trusts’ mission is to improve the quality of life, and an effectively functioning justice system is critical to this, not simply at an individual level, but for the economic and social development of the country as a whole.

In a unique initiative, the India Justice Report ranks individual Indian states in relation to their capacity to deliver access to justice. The Tata Trusts brought together a group of sectoral experts — Centre for Social Justice, Common Cause, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, DAKSH, Tata Institute of Social Sciences - Prayas and Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy — to develop a report that would measure the structural capacity of state-based instrumentalities of the justice system against their own declared mandates with a view to pinpointing areas that lend themselves to immediate solutions. The first ever ranking was published in November 2019.

The second edition of the India Justice Report is all about comparisons and tracking the rise and falls in each state’s structural and financial capacity to deliver justice using the latest available government figures.

The ranking is based on quantitative measurements of budgets, human resources, infrastructure, workload, diversity across police, judiciary, prisons and legal aid in 18 large and medium sized states with a population of over 1 crore and 7 small states. Data for 7 Union Territories (UTs) and 4 other unranked states is also provided.

The India Justice Report 2020 not only provides pillar and theme wise comparisons between similarly situated states one against another, but also allows for an understanding of what improvements and shortfalls have been made within each state’s own pillars and themes since the 2019 report, and over 5 years. These mark out clear discernible trends and directions.

The report and rankings will be available as a printed publication by 3 pm January 28, 2021.

India Justice Report 2020:

Read the full report here and the National factsheet (English) and National factsheet (Hindi)

Read the press release and the backgrounders on police, prisons, judiciary, legal aid, trends, diversity, human resources and technology

To view the interactive web visualisation of the India Justice Report for the overall and pillar-wise ranking, assessing and comparing of states and data on the 2019 ranking, please click here.

India Justice Report 2019:

Read the full report here, and the state-wise factsheets hereNational factsheet (English), National Factsheet (Hindi), National factsheet (Bengali), National Factsheet (Marathi), National Factsheet (Kannada), National Factsheet (Gujarati), Delhi (English), Delhi (Hindi), Bihar (Hindi), Gujarat (Gujarati), Karnataka (Kannada), Madhya Pradesh (Hindi), Maharashtra (Marathi), Rajasthan (Hindi), Uttar Pradesh (Hindi), and West Bengal (Bengali).

Read the press release here and the backgrounders on the pillars: police, prisons, judiciary and legal aid; and themes: human resources, diversity and trends.

To watch the video revealing the rankings, please click here

To watch a video to understand how we arrived at the rankings, please click here