team has also been placed with the Department of Justice with the specific purpose of supporting
      the National Mission for Justice Delivery and Legal Reforms. The second phase of the project
      will continue to focus both on the demand and supply side. In terms of geographical coverage,
      the project will focus efforts in 1-2 selected districts in the eight states of Bihar, Chhattisgarh,
      Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh for better
      impact. The project will try to ensure sustainability of results achieved in the previous phase.
      Legal Affairs
            Department of Legal Affairs is the nodal department for reciprocal arrangement with
      foreign countries for enforcement of arbitral awards pursuant to the New York Convention under
      section 44(b) of the Arbitration and Concilliation Act, 1996. The department of Legal Affairs is
      the Central Authority under the Hague Convention of 1965 for service aboard of judicial and
      extra-judicial documents in civil and commercial matters. Under this obligation, around 9309
      requests have been processed since May, 2014 till May, 2017.
      Legal Information Management and Briefing System
            In line with Digital India mission, this system digitalizes the court case details and brings
      various stakeholders on a single platform. LIMBS helps to introduce transparency as well as a
      sense of ownership among various stakeholders during the entire life cycle of a court case. In a
      very short span, with the help of various ministries and their nodal officers and local admins,
      LIMBS has captured more than 1.36 L court cases with more than 5500 registered users, more
      than 14000 advocates, and 1200 courts. Number of Arbitration cases on the portal is 452. More
      than 200 presentations have been made for concerned officers of the various
      Ministries/Departments 62 in number.
      Way Forward
            Department of Legal Affairs has identified some focus areas to encourage the principles of
      transparency, objectivity and accountability in its dealings with the public in conformity, inter-
      alia, with the objective of good governance, minimum government, maximum governance and
      ease of doing business and reducing litigation within the framework and mandate assigned to it.
      Because of the welfare nature, the size of the government is enormous. New laws and tools are
      being evolved to meet new situations arising due to growth, development, science and
      technology, increase in population, paraphernalia and consciousness amongst people about their
      rights. In this context the following major initiatives/reforms are proposed for vision New India-
      2022:-
      Litigation Assessment
            The Department has taken preliminary steps to formulate litigation assessment/legal
      audit/guidelines to examine a case during its journey arising from a dispute to a full blown
      litigation and its outcome and subsequent implementation aspect or otherwise. If the litigation
      assessment is carried out at the stage of policy formulation it would have the following results:
      (i) a holistic picture will emerge in the proposal; (ii) may prevent litigation to crop up; (iii) will
      bring down case load on the judicial system and; (iv) reduce consequent burden on the public
      exchequer.
      National Litigation Policy