New Delhi, Nov 4 (PTI) Justice Siddharth Mridul of the Delhi High Court on Friday said the judiciary's duties go beyond being a sentinel to safeguard the fundamental rights to ensuring socio-economic freedom and equality in India.

He was speaking at the 27th Justice Sunanda Bhandare Memorial Lecture.

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"We must bear in mind that the judiciary as an institution is not just a sentinel to safeguard the fundamental rights of the people but to ensure that there is socio-economic and political freedom in India and equality," Mridul said.

The lecture, "Democracy on the Ground: What works, What doesn't and Why?", was delivered by Nobel laureate and economist Abhijit Banerjee.

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Talking about the topic of discussion, Mridul said that democracy should be directed at alleviating hunger and poverty.

"I have always believed that democracy, ours in particular, should be directed at the two principal crimes that we inflict on our people that is hunger and poverty. And I believe that any system that doesn't alleviate people's hunger and their poverty will not work, and cannot be countenanced," he said.

Mridul added that people are "completely divorced from reality" when it comes to electing their representatives.

"It's unfortunate because I'd have thought that all those who aspire to serve the people would begin on the premise of antyodaya, which is the rise of the last person, the lowest economic denominator. And it's this where I believe that the judiciary has a very important part to play, because as justice V Krishna Iyer said, 'law without politics is blind and politics without law is deaf'," he said.

As part of the annual lecture, Banerjee talked about India's democratic failures.

He said that despite having a competitive election, which in theory should incentivise good performance by candidates, it does not yield results at the ground level.

"Then there is democratic failure, somehow the competition that we see does not translate into incentives to perform. There is a sense in the idea that competition will generate people taking action that are in the interest of the voters to win. That mechanism doesn't work as it should," Banerjee said.

He also explained that India's democracy also fails by design as on one hand reservations, by evidence, have "salutary effects" on many outcomes, the reserved seats get rotated leading to term-limited representatives at panchayat levels.

"...a very large fraction in panchayat elections of the incumbents cannot run the next time...because of the rotation of seats between different types of reservations. So a lot of people can't run next time.

"I think local democracy is valuable. Maybe we get failure but that's failure by design. And likewise we want reservations. There are very compelling evidence that reservations for SC, ST and women have salutary effects on many outcomes," he said.

He added that despite claims being made that reservations lead to massive incompetence, there is no evidence of it.

"There is good reasons to have reservation but then they bite you back in other ways. Once you have reservations, you can't have incumbents running again for elections because of rotating reserved constituencies.

"So you have a tension between the commitment to reservation and commitment to letting people continue who are performing well," the 61-year-old economist said.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)