NEW DELHI: The mediation cell set up at the Tis Hazari District courts here this past October has gone down well with litigants who had been moving from one court to the other for the past several years with no sings of their cases reaching an end.

The cell has its own courtrooms and dedicated presiding officers and sits everyday for consideration and disposal of civil disputes and petty criminal cases with mutual consent of the parties concerned.

However, the Delhi Bar Association (DBA) has opposed the creation of the cell on two grounds that it was being funded by foreign funding agency Ford Foundation and that American nationals have been engaged to train judges here to run the cell.

Honorary president of the DBA Rajiv Khosla said: "The Ford Foundation is providing money for the cell without permission from any authority; and American nationals being brought in for training judges here for the cell is actually an attempt to give backdoor entry to foreign lawyers in the country to practice.''

Of the 532 cases that the cell has received in the past two months, it has disposed of 234 to the satisfaction of the parties concerned.

Two of the resolved cases stand out for the duration they had been pending in regular courts and the relief that the litigants involved in the disputes got due to their satisfactory resolution. The cell disposed of a 21-year-old property dispute in just five hearings, and the litigants in the dispute was relieved of the harassment of travelling to the Capital on every hearing. Another property dispute of 37 years was also resolved to the satisfaction of both the parties in just four hearings.

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