As the Supreme Court of India resumes its regular routine after an annual six-week summer recess that ended on Monday, this is a good moment to look at one of the biggest problems that has dogged the country’s legal system: a huge and growing case backlog.
According to the National Judicial Data Grid 2025, the number of pending cases across all three levels of the judiciary is over 56 million, a staggering figure, with over 96,000 cases awaiting disposal at the apex court alone. The pending case list of various high courts exceeds 6.4 million and that of subordinate courts 49.8 million.
Clearly, the saying ‘Justice delayed is justice denied’ is not just a cliché, but an apt description of the state of India’s legal system. No wonder the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index for 2025 ranks India below Indonesia, Nepal and Vietnam on overall justice system delivery.
It is not enough to have modern laws. These must be backed by an efficient mechanism for the delivery of justice that, among other things, protects civil and property rights, preserves sanctity of contracts and enforces the rights and liabilities of parties in a timely manner.
Today, roughly three-fourths of prisoners in India are under-trials: unconvicted, presumed innocent till proven guilty under the law, yet serving time anyway—often for longer than the sentence they would have got had they pleaded guilty.
Almost a decade ago, the Economic Survey for 2017-18 devoted a chapter to judicial delays in the context of ‘ease of doing business,’ calling timely justice a “prerequisite for business and commerce.” Sadly, very little has changed since. Indeed, till the World Bank discontinued its Ease of Doing Business Index in September 2021, India fared poorly on ‘ease of enforcing contracts.’
Pendency, delays and injunctions overburden courts, slowing the progress of cases, especially in the economic realm, and exacting a heavy toll from the economy. Tribunals were conceived as a way to relieve courts of some pressure. But the State of Tribunals Report 2025 of Daksh, a Bengaluru-based legal think-tank, shows that close to ₹25 trillion is tied up in about 356,000 disputes pending at under-staffed commercial tribunals.
Part of this sorry state of affairs can be blamed on a hugely adverse ratio of judges to population. We have just above 15 judges per million people (India Justice Report, 2025), far below global standards. The US has 150 judges for every million, while the European average is around 220.
Perhaps it is also time to rethink the practice of court vacations, a relic of our colonial past, when English judges wanted to retreat from the hot Indian summer to cooler climes.
Even as we address the large and growing backlog of cases on a war footing, we must work harder at keeping disputes out of courtrooms in the first place through alternative mechanisms for dispute resolution like mediation.
The government, as the country’s largest litigant, must do its bit to unclog the system; it should refrain from trivial legal filings and routine appeals. In the words of Sanjeev Sanyal, member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, India’s judicial and legal ecosystem is the “single biggest hurdle” to achieving Viksit Bharat—developed-country status.
It also stands in the way of a crucial hallmark of democracy: the basic assurance that every citizen has access to speedy justice. The time has come to chip away at that hurdle before it overwhelms us.