On August 3, 2026, the Lok Sabha passed a bill raising the Supreme Court's sanctioned strength from 34 to 38 judges. It was parliament's answer to address the rising number of pending cases in the Supreme Court.
More judges is the oldest reform instinct there is: the institution is overloaded, so make the institution bigger. It's a familiar instinct and a familiar trap. Cities widen highways for decades to ease congestion, only to watch the new lanes fill up just as fast. More capacity invites more traffic, not less delay.
When a system keeps producing the same result at any scale, the problem isn't size. It's design.
The banking industry offers us some lessons. After nationalisation, the answer to more people needing banking was more branches. That solved access, not experience: people still queued, still filled the same forms. In the 1990s, reform shifted inward. Banks digitised internal workflows, built stronger data systems and automated processes.
Still, the customer's experience barely moved. In the early 2000s, that automation extended outward into netbanking, mobile apps, ATMs. Friction went down. But the design still started from the bank, extending its own systems a little further to the citizen.
The real break came with UPI. It didn't start by asking how to extend or improve the existing banking system. It started by asking how we might let a person pay her auto driver instantly, using nothing but a phone number. Every institution, every technology, every incentive and policy that had to shift followed from that single, human-scale question; not from what any bank could already do.
That is the difference between institution-centric and people-centric reform. The first asks how to make the institution work better. The second asks what the person needs and what has to change across every institution to give it to them. The first improves a process. The second starts from a clean sheet and redesigns roles, incentives and information flows around the user, breaking silos between institutions in the process.
Indian courts today are moving through banking's earlier stages at once. More judges for capacity, e-filing or AI transcription for efficiency. Each is a genuine leap in capability. But all of it is still the judiciary extending its own systems outward. They answer "how do we make courts bigger, more efficient, more accessible?" not "how might two people resolve a disagreement without becoming experts in procedure?"
That second question is critical for transformation. A shopkeeper disputing a refund or a gig worker owed a week's pay don't experience their problem as a "case." They experience it as a disagreement they want resolved fairly and quickly. A people-centric approach to dispute resolution starts there, not from what a court is already equipped to process.
For example, could we imagine an ecosystem that enables parties to resolve their own disputes directly? The straightest path: a platform that helps them frame the issue, gives them the knowledge and tools to negotiate it between themselves and, only if that doesn't work, lets them choose a pathway forward, from mediation to court.
The Chief Justice's own words at the mediation conference earlier this month name the right goal: "peace is not the absence of law and preserving a relationship between two disputing parties is its own form of justice." Mediation, as practiced today, still gets there through an expert facilitator. The more radical version trusts the person herself to get there: an instinct that still lives at the margins of reform.
How do we get there?
First, engage and learn from the people the system serves — litigants, undertrials, small claimants and the community mediators already doing this work.
Second, orchestrate collaboration across justice agencies, government, non-profits and the private sector, because for a person, a dispute is one experience, not several institutional ones.
Third, build in continuous feedback, so the system keeps learning from the people moving through it.
None of this argues against more judges, or against what e-courts are building. Every people-centric leap stands on institutional progress before it. UPI couldn't have happened without the netbanking and ATM infrastructure banks spent a decade building. The question is whether we're also willing to ask the harder one: how might we help a person resolve their dispute and design everything else backward from there?
That is the UPI moment Indian justice is still waiting for.