The scales of justice in the world’s largest democracy are groaning under the crushing weight of an unprecedented legal backlog. Public discourse and popular media frequently direct their collective ire at the judiciary, painting a picture of sluggish courts and vacationing judges.
However, an empirical exploration of the Indian legal landscape reveals a startling paradox. The State, which is constitutionally obligated to facilitate swift and accessible justice, is actually the primary architect of this judicial paralysis. The government has transformed into a compulsive litigant, weaponising the judicial apparatus to mask administrative inefficiencies and bureaucratic apathy.
To genuinely understand the crisis of pendency, one must look beyond the courtroom and examine the corridors of executive power, where matters that could be effortlessly mediated are instead pushed into an endless vortex of appeals and contempt petitions.
To place the judiciary’s performance in its proper context, it is vital to recognise the severe capacity constraints under which it operates. The nation functions with a severely depleted judicial workforce. In 1987, in its 120th Report, the Law Commission of India strongly recommended a ratio of 50 judges per million citizens to maintain a functional legal system. Decades later, India continues to languish with a remarkably poor ratio of approximately 16 judges per million people to 22 judges per million, which is less than half the recommended strength and a fraction of the 150 judges per million seen in the United States or 220 judges per million seen in Europe.
Despite these crippling shortages and vacancy rates hovering around 33% in High Courts, the judiciary achieves staggering disposal figures. District court judges frequently handle an overwhelming average of 2,200 cases annually, while certain High Court dockets swell to 15,000 cases per judge. Quantitative queueing simulations demonstrate that the Supreme Court operates at near total capacity utilisation and adding just a 7% increase in bench strength could reduce average delays by up to 90%. Therefore, the narrative that the judiciary is underperforming is statistically flawed; they are executing a monumental task while operating at a fraction of their required manpower.
This severe shortage of personnel and immense capacity constraint is a direct consequence of chronic financial starvation of the judiciary by both the Union and State governments. The budgetary allocations reflect a systemic neglect of the third pillar of democracy, with India spending a mere 0.08% of its Gross Domestic Product on the courts. At the central level, the government allocated ₹4,509 crore to the Ministry of Law and Justice, representing less than half a per cent of the total budget, with only ₹622 crore for the Supreme Court.
The situation at the State level is equally dismal. The responsibility of funding the district and subordinate courts, where over 85% of the national backlog resides, falls primarily on the State governments. Yet, an analysis of 11 high GDP states for the financial year 2024-2025 reveals that they allocated a meagre average of 0.76% of their total budgets to the judiciary. To put this in perspective, these states spend an average of ₹1,616 per capita on the police force, compared to a mere ₹339 per capita on the courts.
Compounding this financial neglect is a profound administrative inefficiency in utilising even the allocated funds. The Department related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice on the Demands for Grants (2026-27) of the Department of Justice (Ministry of Law & Justice), recently submitted its 162nd Report on 16th March 2026, highlighting that out of ₹931 crore released by the Central government for judicial infrastructure, a mere ₹407 crore had been spent by the states by early 2026. This vindicates the fact that the executive branch is effectively choking the justice system by withholding necessary resources required to appoint more judges.
With the judiciary already starved of resources, the State exponentially worsens the crisis by flooding the dockets as the nation’s biggest litigant. Empirical data consistently indicates that the government and its various instrumentalities are party to approximately 50% of the 54 million pending cases across the country. A substantial portion of this litigation is entirely avoidable and stems from an entrenched bureaucratic pathology known as the 'let the court decide' syndrome. Civil servants operate under a paralysing fear of vigilance inquiries, subsequent audits and allegations of corruption or clientelism. To evade personal accountability for administrative decisions, especially those involving financial payouts, officials systematically reject legitimate requests. They prefer to force the aggrieved citizen to seek a judicial mandate. Once a lower court rules against the department, the same fear of scrutiny dictates that the government must mechanically appeal the decision to the highest possible forum, irrespective of the legal merits of the case.
The sheer absurdity of this appellate behaviour is most visible in revenue and tax disputes. A meticulous Comptroller and Auditor General report demonstrated that the success rate of the government in indirect tax appeals plummets drastically as cases move up the judicial hierarchy, reaching an abysmal success rate of 1.14% at the Supreme Court. The government routinely utilises public funds to fight cases where the financial costs of engaging advocates vastly exceed the actual disputed amount.
This compulsive litigiousness exacts a devastating toll on the national economy. A recent report on the state of tribunals revealed that an astronomical ₹24 lakh crore is currently locked in pending commercial litigation. This locked capital artificially restricts the fiscal space available for public welfare spending and severely deteriorates the metrics used by international investors to gauge the ease of doing business.
Beyond filing frivolous appeals, the State’s profound apathy toward implementing clear and binding judicial directives has birthed a secondary crisis of contempt litigation. By early 2025, the Ministry of Law and Justice acknowledged that over 1,43,573 contempt cases were pending against government officials in various High Courts, alongside nearly 1,852 in the Supreme Court. Citizens who spend decades securing a favourable verdict are forced to endure another gruelling cycle of litigation simply to coerce the State into compliance. The judiciary has increasingly recognised this menace and adopted a sterner posture. In March 2026, Supreme Court publicly criticised the government for complaining about backlogs while simultaneously feeding that very pendency through relentless litigation. Courts have transitioned from issuing verbal reprimands to imposing severe financial costs on state departments. For instance, the Madras High Court recently imposed a penalty of ₹5 lakh on the Tamil Nadu government for maliciously and repeatedly agitating a settled matter. Similarly, the Karnataka High Court penalised the Bangalore Development Authority with a ₹5 lakh fine for pursuing an unrealistic appeal.
Recognising the unsustainability of this ecosystem, the government has attempted several policy corrections. The government framed the aspirational National Litigation Policy of 2010, but it utterly failed because it lacked enforceable mechanisms to deter the bureaucracy. Even the well meaning Committee on Disputes, created by the Supreme Court to prevent inter-departmental lawsuits, devolved into another layer of delay and had to be dismantled. However, the April 2025 directive for the efficient and effective management of litigation, issued by the government of india, Ministry of Law and Justice Department of Legal Affairs, offers a more rigorous structural remedy. By establishing a strict ₹10 crore pecuniary threshold for commercial appeals, creating dedicated legal cells and integrating tracking mechanisms through the Legal Information Management & Briefing System (LIMBS), which currently monitors over 7 lakh live cases, the State is finally attempting to transition from a compulsive litigator to a responsible one.
Attributing the entirety of the judicial backlog to the courts is a fundamentally flawed diagnosis that ignores the massive footprint of the State. A judiciary operating at less than half its required capacity cannot magically resolve a pendency crisis engineered by a government that litigates compulsively and funds the courts inadequately. For the promise of timely justice to become a reality, the executive machinery must conquer its paralysing fear of accountability, embrace mediation and rigorously enforce internal policies that penalise frivolous appeals. The majestic edifice of the rule of law can only stand tall when the government recognises that conceding a just claim is not a defeat but a profound victory for democratic governance.
Ajmal Shah is an advocate practicing before the High Court of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh, at Srinagar.