Poor man’s pal

The pay of the 93 attorneys appointed by the court — from the Supreme Court to the district level — to fight on behalf of the litigants too poor to hire lawyers on their own is shamefully low, even for a part-time job. For half a century, the practice has existed of hiring legal practitioners, called appointed attorneys in the court circles, on contract for up to two years. There are two categories of them — the pleaders who are required to possess no more than a Proficiency Certificate in Law get only Rs. 2, 000 per month and the advocates who have to possess a Bachelor’s degree in Law, only Rs. 2, 500. This, too, after their salary increase of Rs. 500 in January.

These attorneys are recognised as civil servants and get much less than even the basic salary of a peon, that stands at Rs. 3, 700 per month. And they are supposed to be defending the rights of the poor people in all three tiers of the judiciary while private practitioners charging individually for the cases make an incredibly high income, not to talk of those whose monthly pickings run to lakhs of rupees.This raises several questions. One is that though the government may say it has looked after the interests of the poor litigants, in practice it amounts to doing so only for the sake of form. On such a salary, who would be willing to take a job other than fresh, often hard-pressed, graduates with just a licence in hand to plead? When they are just completing their ‘internship’ their contract lapses, bringing in a new crop of young people barely out of college. It is also questionable that these attorneys can do full justice to the cases they take up, with experienced, high-charging lawyers arrayed on the other side of the dock. It is also time a study was made of the success rate of the ‘poor cases’ undertaken under the government’s free legal service. But, whether the government may decide to appoint experienced or raw people as attorneys, though the latter would clearly be preferable, the salaries must at least be respectable.

Even more galling is the fact that the Cabinet fixes or changes these salaries. Though the concept behind the system may not be a full-time one, the nature of the job undoubtedly is. For instance, an attorney at the Supreme Court is reported to have dealt with 160 cases in a year. The plight of the appointed attorneys also raises a moral question for the government: How can it expect others in society to honour the minimum wage principle while it itself metes out such an injustice, of all people to those supposed to defend the citizens’ rights. However, a silver lining for these hapless attorneys is a report prepared and recently submitted by a committee headed by apex court judge Anup Raj Sharma. The report recommends treating pleaders as section officers and advocates as under-secretaries. Besides, as the job is contractual, the attorneys are deprived of all the perks and facilities given to regular employees. Because of this it would not be unfair at all if these attorneys received a salary only slightly more than the basic pay of their confirmed counterparts.

Source: The Himalayan Times, May 7, 2007