Supreme Court strength hits 38 as Centre appoints five new judges following bench expansion

The Centre on Monday notified the appointment of five new judges to the Supreme Court of India, taking the headcount of the country’s top court to 38 (Chief Justice plus 37 judges) from 34, according to a statement by the Union law and justice ministry.

The newly notified judges are Justice Sheel Nagu, chief justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court; Justice Shree Chandrashekhar, chief justice of the Bombay High Court; Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva, chief justice of the Madhya Pradesh High Court; Justice Arun Palli, chief justice of the High Court of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh; and senior advocate Venkita Subramani Mohana.

Four of these were already sitting high court judges, while Mohana became only the second woman ever to be appointed Supreme Court judge directly from the bar. Previous Supreme Court appointees directly from the bar include Justice Rohinton Nariman and former Chief Justice U.U. Lalit, both inducted in 2014.

The Supreme Court’s sanctioned strength, including the chief justice, is now 38 judges, but there is still one vacancy. Before these appointments, the court was operating with 32 judges and six vacancies. The last time the sanctioned strength of the Supreme Court bench, excluding the chief justice, was increased was in 2019, from 30 to 33.

The new appointments come only days after the Union cabinet approved an increase in the headcount of Supreme Court judges (excluding the chief justice) from 33 to 37 on 6 May, to increase the efficiency of the top court and ensure speedy justice for citizens.

Oldest pending case from 1986

Retired Supreme Court judge Hemant Gupta said the expansion of the top court in May followed by timely appointments would help clear more cases and reduce the court’s enormous workload and backlog.

“Often there are larger benches hearing cases—seven judges, nine judges. When there are larger benches, it reduces the number of judges available to hear other matters. For instance, the Sabarimala judgement took nearly three weeks,” said Gupta, who also headed the central government’s India International Arbitration Centre (IIAC) in New Delhi.

The Sabarimala judgement refers to Indian Young Lawyers Association vs State of Kerala (2018), in which a five-judge Supreme Court bench ruled with a 4-1 majority that women of all ages should be allowed to enter the Sabarimala temple.

According to the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG), a government-run portal, 92,249 cases are pending in the Supreme Court, of which 35,808 (38%) are less than a year old. The oldest case still pending before the court is from 1986, according to the NJDG. India’s top court disposed of 56,342 cases in 2025 against 60,948 cases filed in the same period, the data showed.

Lawyers, however, said the appointments were not just about reducing pending cases in the apex court. “The real significance of these appointments lies in reinforcing the Supreme Court’s institutional capacity and its ability to effectively discharge its Constitutional responsibilities,” said Nikhil Jain, vice president of the Supreme Court Advocates on Record Association, a representative body for advocates-on-record in the top court.