Judgment

KRISHNA IYER, J. :- A dispute between the appellant mill (the Strawboard Manufacturing Company Ltd.) and its workmen, regarding a scheme of gratuity, was referred to the Industrial Tribunal, way back in Feburary 1958; and, long 19 years later, this Court is pronouncing on the validity of the award made by the Tribunal in favour of the workmen : Small wonder the respondent workmen, after this tiring and traumatic tantalization, have not turned up to argue their cause, although Shri Parekh, as amicus curiae, has filled the gap. Such an unhappy and not infrequent phenomenon as considerable delay in adjudication and implementation is destructive of industrial peace and productive of disenchantment with labour jurisprudence. Naturally, even constitutional provisions and governmental decisions about labout and concern for its welfare cease to achieve the desired goals when the legal process limps and lingers and rights turn illusory when remedies prove elusive. The life of rights is remedies and a jurisprudence of ready reliefs alone can inhibit the weaker numbers of our land asking the disturbing question : Is Law Dead?. Dicey wrote long ago :

"The saw ubi jus ibi remedium, becomes from this point of view something much more important than a mere tautological proposition. In its bearing upon constitutional law, it means that the Englishmen whose labours gradually formed the complicated set of laws and institutions which we call the Constitution, fixed their minds far more intently on providing remedies for the enforcement of particular rights of for averting definite worngs, than upon any declarations of the Rights of Man or Englishmen."

(Jurisprudence of Remedies : University of Pennsylvania Law Review Vol. 117, Nov. 1968, p. 1, 16)

2. It is more than rhetoric to say that courts belong to be people.

3. Judges occupy the publics bench of justice. They implement the publics sense of justice. If the Courts are the fulcrum of the justice-system, there is a strong case for the reform of Court methodology and bestowal of attention on efficient management of judicial administration. Otherwise, the courts may be so overloaded or so mismanaged that they grind to a halt and citizens exercise of their rights discouraged or furstrated. The vital aspects of the jurisprudence of remedies include speeding the pace of litigation from the cradle to the grave. We are reluctant to make these self-critical observations about putting our house in order, but when the consumers of justice like workmen lose interest in the judicial process and are absent, legislative unawareness of research and development as to the needs of courts and simplification and acceleration o the judicative apparatus become matters of national concern. Laws delays are in some measure, caused by legislative inaction in making competent, radical change in the procedural laws and sufficient financing and modernising of the justice system as a high priority programme.

4. The chequered career of this lis and its zig zag climb up the precipice of justice contextually deserves brief narration. The order of reference was made early in 1958, the usual processual exercise before the Tribunal resulted in an award on May 1, 1958 where the tribunal refused the relief bearing on gratuity. The disappointed workers challeged the award before the High Court which set it aside in November 1963 - too long a hibernation in the High Court for a labour dispute where prompt adjudication is the essence of industrial peace. Anyway, when the case came back to the tribunal, its decision took another six inscrutable years and, on October 31, 1969, a fresh award was whereunder the tribunal framed a gratuity scheme of gave the guidelines thereof. This time the appellant mill straight came to the SC with the present appeal for which special leave was granted in a limied way, in the sense that it was confined to the question whether the correct principles on which gratuity should be payable have been foll