Nyay Sadan, Ranchi

Ranchi, May 4: Call it the law at its best.

For the first time, Jharkhand State Legal Services Authority (Jhalsa) will hold an online awareness programme for judicial officers, lawyers and litigants in Palamau — one of several Naxalite-affected districts of the state — on Thursday.

The drive will be conducted by acting Chief Justice M.Y. Eqbal from Nyay Sadan in the capital. He will also launch an online mediation and conciliation centre on the civil court premises and a legal aid clinic at Palamau jail.

“It will be an experiment with video-conferencing to create awareness among judicial officers, lawyers and litigants. The poor can avail of free legal help to resolve long-pending disputes,” Eqbal, also the patron-in chief of Jhalsa, said.

If the experiment was successful, it would be extended to other districts and be held on a regular basis, he added.

Palamau will be the 11th district to have a mediation and conciliation centre, a hassle-free platform for litigants.

The other districts where such centres are operational are Ranchi, Dhanbad, Bokaro, Hazaribagh, Deoghar, Jamshedpur, Giridih, Dumka, Chaibasa and Lohardaga. Jharkhand High Court, too, has a mediation centre. The district legal services authorities are video-linked with Jhalsa.

The Centre has asked the judiciary to aggressively pursue the cause of mediation centres and has allocated Rs 1 crore for every district for the next five years.

Justice Eqbal said around 140 judicial officers and lawyers had been trained by the Judicial Academy to mediate long-pending civil and criminal cases in the state.

Palamau district judge and executive chairman of the district legal services authority G.K. Verma said that the mediation centre would boost people’s faith in the system. “We have resolved several cases filed under dowry laws. The success rate has been more than 50 per cent,” he pointed out.

The mediation centre and legal aid clinic at Palamau jail are expected to make the state’s judicial system more effective. “Though the legal aid clinic will not directly help inmates charged with waging a war against the state, it will certainly help others,” a judicial officer said.

Mediation can apply to a range of disputes such as commercial, diplomatic, workplace and matrimonial. It involves a neutral third party, the mediator, who assists the other parties come to an agreement with concrete effect and common interest. The best part is that the system is not controlled by any statutes, civil or criminal procedure code. Each mediator is granted the freedom to develop and apply his or her own method to resolve a specific case.