Pendency in the Legal Justice System - Case Study of India

Abstract

Justice that arrives too late is not justice at all. India's courts are carrying one of the largest case backlogs in the world: as of 31 December 2025, more than 5.39 crore cases, roughly 54 million, were pending across the Supreme Court, the High Courts and the district courts (Ministry of Law & Justice, 2026). This paper argues that pendency is not an accident of a large population but a solvable, structural failure, and that its single most binding cause is a shortage of judges. India now has strong law on the books: the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 sets hard trial timelines, and the Mediation Act, 2023 gives disputes a route out of court. What it lacks is the bench strength to make those tools bite. A country's population should be an asset to develop, not a burden the courts cannot absorb; the way to make it one is to fill the judiciary, adopt case management that has already worked elsewhere, and route the right disputes away from trial.

Introduction

A fair trial is, above all, a prompt one. When a case drags on for years or decades, the delay itself becomes a punishment, and the promise of Article 21 of the Constitution, the right to life and personal liberty, which the Supreme Court reads to include a speedy trial, is quietly broken. Delayed justice cannot honestly be called fair, and what is not fair is not justice at all.

Pendency is not only a problem for the people waiting in line. The judiciary is one of the three organs of the state, and when it slows, the effects cascade, into the economy, into public trust, and into the everyday sense that rules will be enforced. That is why a backlog of cases is really a backlog of justice, and a backlog of justice is a store of injustice.

Objective

This paper investigates the causes of pendency in the Indian justice system, focusing on the institutional and structural causes that policy can actually change, judicial vacancies, procedure and the design of dispute resolution. It then compares India with a democracy that faced a serious backlog and cleared it, drawing out what India can borrow, and evaluates the reforms India has recently enacted and what would make them work.

Methodology

The paper is built on a close reading of credible sources: official case-load data from the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG), figures placed before Parliament by the Ministry of Law & Justice, Law Commission recommendations, the text of recent statutes, and reputable reporting and analysis. The approach is qualitative, it reads the evidence to explain why cases pile up and which levers move the number.

The capacity gap: too few judges

The most common explanation for pendency is a simple one: there are not enough judges. The data supports it. India's judge-to-population ratio stands at roughly 21 to 22 judges per million people, barely changed from 21 in 2023, against the 50 per million that the Law Commission of India recommended back in 1987 and that the Supreme Court reaffirmed in 2002 (The Print, 2025). Four decades on, the country is not even halfway to its own target.

The gap is not mainly about sanctioning judges; it is about filling the seats. As of 1 October 2025, India's High Courts had a sanctioned strength of 1,122 judges but only 829 working, 293 vacancies, more than a quarter of all posts empty (The Wire, 2025). The subordinate judiciary, which carries the overwhelming majority of cases, ran an 18.6% vacancy rate (4,827 unfilled posts out of 25,875). Raising the sanctioned number does nothing on its own: if seats are created but left vacant, the extra strength exists only on paper. The Allahabad High Court is the clearest example, it carries the heaviest pendency of any High Court, about 12.07 lakh cases (Ministry of Law & Justice, 2026), even as vacancies go unfilled. More judges only help when the appointments actually happen.

Procedure and delay: the charge sheet, and the new code

Delay is also written into procedure. Under the old Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, a criminal case could not move to trial until the police filed a charge sheet, yet the Code set only loose limits on how long an investigation could take. In the absence of a charge sheet, a criminal case simply waits.

This is one area where the law has just changed. The 1973 Code has been replaced by the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (BNSS), in force from July 2024, which builds explicit timelines into the process: charges must be framed within 60 days of the first hearing (s.263), judgment delivered within 30 days of the close of arguments, extendable to 45 for recorded reasons (s.258), and trials run on a day-to-day basis with no more than two adjournments per party (s.346) (AZB & Partners, 2024). On paper, the procedural gap the older law left open is now closed. The catch is that timelines are only as real as the courts' ability to meet them, a 60-day clock means little in a courtroom that does not have a sitting judge. This is exactly why the capacity problem and the procedure problem are the same problem.

Why pendency is a problem: a PESTEL reading

To see how widely the damage spreads, it helps to use PESTEL, an established framework for scanning the political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental/ethical pressures around an issue.

• Political. A justice system that cannot deliver erodes trust in the democratic institutions built to serve citizens, which in turn weakens engagement and the legitimacy of governance.
• Economic. Long legal battles are a tax on business, and they fall hardest on the smallest firms, which rarely have the resources to fight for years. Slow enforcement of contracts also signals risk to investors and can discourage the very entrepreneurship that programmes such as Start-up India and Make in India are meant to encourage.
• Social. A backlog of cases is a backlog of justice, and delay lands heaviest on those who can least afford it, straining families, overwhelming legal-aid services, and pushing marginalized people further from a remedy.
• Ethical. When wrongdoing goes unpunished for years, delay itself becomes a strategy: the party that can outlast the other often wins, which is the opposite of a fair trial.
• Legal. Time corrodes cases, evidence degrades, memories fade, witnesses become unreachable or unsafe, so the longer a matter waits, the less reliable its eventual outcome.
• Technological. Technology cuts both ways. Greater awareness of rights and easier filing bring more cases into the system; but the same technology, from the e-Courts project to data tools that flag patterns in the docket, is also part of the cure.

What worked elsewhere: Singapore's turnaround

The Objective promised a comparison, and Singapore is the sharpest one. In 1990, when Yong Pung How became Chief Justice, the courts "groaned under a backlog of 2,000 suits" that would have taken many years to clear (Singapore Judiciary, 2020). Within about four years it was gone. By the Opening of the Legal Year in 1994, the Judiciary records, "the backlog had largely been reduced to a footnote in our legal history."

How? Not with a single fix but a package delivered together: pre-trial conferences to settle or narrow cases early, night courts so ordinary people did not have to miss work to attend, an expanded bench with more sitting hours, streamlined procedure, and, soon after, an Electronic Filing System (Singapore Judiciary, 2020). Cases that had once taken years were being concluded within roughly six months (Yong Pung How, Wikipedia). Singapore is a far smaller jurisdiction than India, and the numbers do not transfer directly, but the lesson does: active case management, more judicial capacity, and technology, applied at the same time, can turn a backlog around in a few years rather than a few decades.

Recommendations

The point of the diagnosis is that India already has much of the law it needs; the work is to supply capacity and to route disputes intelligently.

1. Fill the bench, with a system, not a scramble. The recurring failure is that vacancies are filled slowly and unevenly, court by court. The concrete fix is to revive the long-proposed All India Judicial Service (AIJS), which Article 312 already permits and which the Supreme Court (1992) and a Parliamentary Standing Committee (2006) have both endorsed (Drishti IAS). A centralized, annual examination, run on a fixed calendar like the civil-services exam, would recruit district judges at scale, standardize quality, and put a predictable clock on appointments instead of leaving a quarter of High Court seats empty. Reviving AIJS needs a Rajya Sabha resolution and a parliamentary law, not a constitutional amendment, so the obstacle is political will, not legal impossibility. Pay and pensions matter for attracting talent, but they are a supporting measure; the binding fix is a recruitment machine that actually runs.

2. Route the right disputes out of court, and resource it. Alternative dispute resolution (mediation, arbitration, neutral evaluation) is faster, cheaper and less adversarial, and it frees courtrooms for the serious criminal and constitutional matters that only they can decide. India now has the legal scaffolding: the Mediation Act, 2023 gives civil parties a structured, voluntary route to mediate before litigating, and the Commercial Courts Act, 2015 (s.12A) already makes pre-institution mediation mandatory for commercial suits that do not need urgent interim relief (International Bar Association, 2024). The next step is to make mediation real rather than nominal, funding and accrediting mediation centres, and setting a measurable disposal target for referred cases so the mechanism is judged on cases actually settled, not cases merely sent.

3. Enforce the timelines the law now sets. The BNSS 2023 timelines (60-day charge framing, 30 to 45-day judgment, day-to-day trials, capped adjournments) should be treated as commitments, tracked case-by-case through the NJDG, and backed by the judicial strength recommendation (1) provides. Singapore's experience shows the pieces only work together: timelines need judges, judges need case management, and case management needs technology.

Conclusion

Resolving pendency is a matter of fundamental rights and community well-being, and it is genuinely multidimensional, it touches capacity, procedure, technology and the culture of the courts. But multidimensional does not mean intractable. Singapore cleared a serious backlog in four years by doing several sensible things at once. India has, in the last two years, written much of what it needs into law. The decisive, unglamorous task now is to fill the bench, so that the timelines and the mediation routes already on the statute book become real for the people waiting on them. A large population is only a burden when the institutions meant to serve it cannot keep up; staff the courts, and it becomes an asset again.

Sources

1. Moneylife, Court case pendency rises to 5.39 crore (Ministry of Law & Justice / NJDG, data as of 31 December 2025)
2. The Print, India's judge-to-population ratio (~21 to 22 per million) vs the Law Commission's 1987 recommendation of 50 per million
3. The Wire, High Court and subordinate-judiciary vacancies, 2025 (1,122 sanctioned / 829 working / 293 vacant; 18.6% subordinate vacancy)
4. Singapore Judiciary, Statement on former Chief Justice Yong Pung How (the ~2,000-suit backlog cleared by 1994)
5. Yong Pung How, Wikipedia (night courts; hearings concluded within about six months after the reforms)
6. International Bar Association, The Mediation Act 2023 (voluntary pre-litigation mediation; mandatory pre-institution mediation for commercial suits under the Commercial Courts Act, 2015)
7. Drishti IAS, All India Judicial Service (Article 312; endorsements; current status)
8. AZB & Partners, Overview of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (statutory trial timelines under ss.263, 258, 346)