{ ९ ) GOVERNMENT OF INDIA. LEGISLATIVE DEPARTMENT. The following Report of a Select Committee, together with the Bill as settled by them, was presented to the Council of the Governor-General of India for the purpose of making Laws and ltegulations on the 9th March 1875 :— Wr, the undersigned Members of the Select Committee to which the Bill for consolidating and amending the laws relating to the Procedure of the Courts of Civil Judicature in British India was referred, have the honor to report that we have considered the Bill and the papers not d in the appendix and received since April 1865, the date of the presentation of the last report. 1. This Bill has now been before the Council for nearly eleven years. Without having been formally introduced, it was published in 1864. It was introduced and referred to a Committee in the following November. An amended druft was published in April 1865, sent house to the Secretary of S ate in Council, and by him referred to the Indian Law Commissioners. They were of opinion that the project of consolidation should be deferred, and that it would be bitter to a nend the C. de by successive enactments as occasion might demand. The Secretary of State in Council, in his despatch of the 25th February 1867, expressed his concur rence in that opinion. 2. In consequence. the woulo was broken off. But since the correspondence above referred to, there have been more changes in the law, each tending to snake some portion of the existing Code inapplicalle to present circumstances. Resides the modifications assected by local Acts, the General ( lawses’ Act of 1868, the Prisoners’ Testimony Act of 1869, the General Stamp Act of the same year, the Court Fees' Act of 1870, the Limitation Act of 1871, the 2. idence Act of 1872, the Criminal Proceduc ("ode of 1872, the Oaths’ Act of 1873 have all had this vsject to a greater or less extent. And every portion of the Code which becomes useless has, unless it is struck away, the effect of distracting, if not of misleading, those who resort to it. 8. Aguin, there has now been a much larger number of decisions, which show either some inconvenience in the rules of the Code, or some ambiguity of expression or absence of direction which has given rise to disputes that it is convenient to settle. To a certain extent these matters are settled by judicial decisions. But the decisions, however well they may interpret the lauguage of the Cede, do not always lay down the rule which is inost beneficial to suitors. And even in the more frequent instances where the decision lays down the best rule, it is often convenient to embody it in the wiitten law. 4. The Government of India has recently decided to make some amendments in the law relating to the execution of decrees. We have embodied the provisions necessary to give effect to this decision ; and we have also endeavoured to render more efficieut the provisions of the Code which relate to execution-deltois unable to pay their debts. 5. Still the groat bulk of the Code remains intact, and so, except by re-arrangement, we propose to leave it. What we have done is to attempt a clearer and more methodical arrangemont of the different parts and clauses of the Code than is now the case; to embody in it a number of judicial decisions, soine incorporated in the substance of the enactments, some by way of explanation, and some by way of illustration : in one or two instances to lay down rules more generally convenient than those which have been decided to result from the present wording of the Code ; to supply some forms of proceeding which may be useful to suitors; and to add a few provisions some of which are borrowed from the Rules of the High Court of Calcutta, and others from the New York Civil Procedure Code.
