In the backdrop of the state government moving towards enactment of a law to settle disputes outside court, Legal Aid Services of West Bengal (LASWEB) has decided to organise a workshop to make people in Calcutta and elsewhere aware about the ?hazards? of court cases. The aim: urge warring groups to settle disputes outside court.

LASWEB is undertaking the programme under the Legal Aid Services Act to reduce pressure on the courts, which are already overburdened with hundreds of thousands of pending cases. The Central Act empowers legal aid organisations to settle disputes outside courts.

Pre and post-marital counselling and pre-litigation counselling are the focus areas of the workshop. The six-week workshop is going to be held from November 18 at Sree Shiksha Sadan in Calcutta. Lawyers, professors and high court judges will be the trainers at the workshop.

?We have undertaken the programme on the basis of Legal Aid Services Act, which empowers organisations like us to train students and lawyers for counselling. The reaction has so far been good from ordinary people and social activists. Nearly 60 sociologists and psychologists, six of them Bangladeshi women, have applied for taking part in the programme as trainees,? said Gitanath Ganguly, executive chairman, LASWEB.

According to a survey conducted by LASWEB and others, the number of divorce cases, particularly in Calcutta, is increasing almost daily. ?Several social problems are the reason behind relations breaking down between couples. We have organised a course to train lawyers and people from other professions to counsel couples before marriage,? said advocate Pradip Roy, an activist of the LASWEB.

He said the counsellors would also be trained to deal with married people, to avert the possibility of divorce. ?This course has been termed Post-Marital Counselling,? said Roy.

Ganguly said his organisation has recently entered into an agreement with a Bangladeshi legal aid organisation to act jointly on the common problems.

?Hundreds of people in both the countries are rotting in jail for crossing the border illegally. Many of them are forced to cross the border for maintaining their livelihood. When they are sent behind the bars, no one stands up for them. We have decided to take steps to free the Bangladeshi people and send them back to their country. Our counterparts in Bangladesh will help to free the Indians in jails there,? Ganguly said.