The Gram Nyayalaya Act was passed in 2008 to make the judicial process participatory, inexpensive and accessible to rural India. But rural courts are still few and far between When a mobile court visited Luhari village in Madhya Pradesh’s Jabalpur district a year ago, it was a blessing for people like Birsan Singh. A tea vendor, Birsan would lose his daily income whenever he had to attend court. He has been going to a court 20 km away for the last 10 years in a case against his family members and neighbours over a minor dispute. For millions of people in rural India, attending court is a nightmare.

Birsan, too, was about to stop pursuing the case, but the mobile court has solved his problem. “Now we have our court in the village,” he says. The Gram Nyayalya Act, which was enacted by Parliament in 2008 and came into effect in October 2009, mandates setting up of village courts. The Act aims at making justice easily accessible to the rural population and dealing with the backlog of cases. Till December 2010, 280 million cases were pending in courts across India. A substantial number of these pertain to community areas, water and other common resources such as pastoral land.

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