If the Supreme Court is inaccessible to a large segment of society because of cost barriers, then doesn’t it amount to total denial of justice? The apex court is the last resort for justice, and in my estimate 9 out of 10 cases of failure of justice are not brought to its notice because people simply cannot afford the cost. The misery is compounded by the declining standards prevailing in the lower judiciary. The framers of the Constitution fell into grievous error when in 1950 they did not provide for setting up of benches of the Supreme Court at other major centres—because they ought to have appreciated the fact that India’s population at the time was about 40 crore and its territories extended from Kanyakumari to Ladakh and from Kutch to Calcutta, and that the overwhelming majority of the population were poor or middle-class.