Immediately after a Sessions Court in Mumbai handed Bollywood superstar Salman Khan a five–year sentence in a hit-and-run case last week, the state government released information that the conviction rate of the state’s lower courts between January 15 and March 15 this year had been 32.93%. It said that out of a total of 47,410 cases in which either conviction or acquittal had taken place, the number of convictions was 15,614. The state’s conviction rate last year was a mere 15%.

One must appreciate the government for its perfect sense of timing in making the data available to the media, but this has also made probing minds ask: Will the government continue to expedite justice in future? And, if it is willing to do so, will such effort be sufficient to enhance conviction rate further? Do the incumbent governments in the state and Centre lag behind in addressing a burning issue such as this? The probing becomes even more pointed in view of the Salman Khan case.