Seventeen years. That is how long after signing a routine one-line permission letter, former Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa was summoned to a Patna courtroom - to testify about an act he had no memory of taking and no stake in.

What Seventeen Years of Waiting Actually Costs

Imagine signing one routine letter in your first decade of service - a standard prior-sanction permission, the kind that crosses a Joint Secretary's desk without a second thought. Now imagine being pulled away from your current responsibilities, seventeen years later, to travel across the country and sit in a courtroom explaining that same signature, while the court refuses even a video-conferencing link for what everyone agrees is uncontested, routine testimony.

This is not a story about corruption or misconduct. Ashok Lavasa did nothing wrong in 2009 and nobody disputes that. The dilemma it exposes is quieter and, in some ways, more troubling: does a justice system that is scrupulously fair on the substance of a case still cause real, avoidable harm through sheer procedural indifference to the people it summons?

Two Real Values in Tension There is a

genuine institutional reason courts default to physical, in-person testimony - reliability. Cross-examination, demeanour and the integrity of the record are traditionally judged to work best with a witness physically present and any weakening of that standard, applied broadly, risks being exploited in genuinely contested cases where identity, memory or coercion are actually in dispute.

Treating every witness identically protects against selectively looser standards being applied where they shouldn't be. But that same rigid uniformity, applied to someone testifying about a seventeen-year-old routine administrative act with no factual dispute attached, imposes a cost with no corresponding benefit.

Lavasa's testimony added nothing that a recorded statement or video link couldn't have captured equally well. What the system extracted from him instead was days of disrupted duty, travel and the tacit message that honest administrative service can result in being treated, procedurally, exactly like a party under active suspicion.

Why This Is an Ethics Question, Not Just an Efficiency One

The temptation is to file this under "judicial pendency"

• an administrative problem, solvable with more digitisation. But the deeper issue is a duty question: does an institution that depends on honest officials making thousands of routine, good-faith decisions owe those officials a proportionate process when it later needs their account of that decision? If the answer is yes, then treating every summons identically, regardless of whether the testimony is contested or routine, is not neutral fairness - it is a failure to recognise that indifference to a good-faith actor's time and dignity is itself an injustice, even when no rule is technically broken.

The Resolution That Costs Something

The honest answer is that courts should differentiate: reserve mandatory physical appearance for testimony that is genuinely contested and permit video conferencing as a default for routine, uncontested witness statements from public servants recounting good-faith administrative acts.

This does sacrifice something - a small increment of evidentiary uniformity and the discipline of treating every witness by the same rule regardless of context. That is a real cost, not a hypothetical one. But it is a smaller cost than continuing to teach honest officials that doing their job correctly today can still mean losing days of their life, years later, to a system too rigid to tell the difference between a routine signature and a genuine dispute.