JBS Vol 17. Num 2. 2015 - The State of Lower Court Performance in Bangladesh

The principal aim of this paper is to study the performance of the lower courts of Bangladesh, especially from the standpoint of its’ operational efficiency. The idea is to generate evidence-based insights on the operational efficiency of the district courts of Bangladesh. The analysis focuses on various objective indicators of district court performance in order to help understand why district court performance vary across the geographic space of the country. In particular, it empirically explores the regional variation in case-disposal rate and the number of cases disposed per judge across the sixty-four district courts of the country. The overall examination offers some key insights, which are: i) Bangladesh’s performance across different rule of law indexes across countries (and even within South Asia) has been less than impressive; ii) The problem of case backlog has been acute; iii) Some district courts act as a “pipeline” through which cases cumulatively accumulate; iv) Low case disposal rate has contributed towards the backlog; v) There is a large variation in “case disposal rate” and “case disposed per judge” across district courts; vi) District courts with similar case load per judge experience wide variation in “disposed cases per judge” – indicating that there is room for improving efficiency using existing resources; vii) There is a negative association between case load and civil case disposal - indicating that increasing the number of judges can mitigate the problem of low disposal rate; viii) Resource allocation must take account of regional variation in judge level productivity and case pressure across district courts. Overall, while this paper remains modest in its scope, it nonetheless offers a focused assessment of objective indicators that helps us understand why and how performance of the lower courts changes over time and space.