In February 2002, seven judges of the Supreme Court were asked whether a citizen’s private property counts as a “material resource of the community” that the State may redistribute under Article 39(b).

The Court said it had “some difficulty” with an older ruling answering the question in the affirmative and sent the question to nine judges. Those nine judges first sat on April 23, 2024. The judgment in Property Owners Association v. State of Maharashtra was pronounced on November 5, 2024.

22 years and nine months to get a hearing. Six-and-a-half months to decide.

I wanted to know whether that was unusual, so I counted. I collected every question the Supreme Court sent to a bench of seven or more judges that was decided, or was still waiting, between January 2000 and September 30, 2026. There are 24. The dates come from the judgments, the Supreme Court Observer’s case records and the list the Law Ministry placed before the Lok Sabha in July 2023. What I found is not a story about one slow case. It is a story about how the Court runs.

Two rules explain everything that follows.

The first is that a bench of the Supreme Court cannot overrule a decision given by a bench of the same size or bigger. If three judges think an old five-judge ruling is wrong, they cannot simply say so. They must pass an order sending the question to a bench of seven or more. The process is generally called a reference. Any bench can make one.

The second rule is about what happens next. Someone has to pick seven or nine judges, take them off their regular work and fix a date. Under the Court’s own judgments, from Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms v. Union of India (2017) to Shanti Bhushan v. Supreme Court of India (2018), only the Chief Justice can do that as “master of the roster”. A referring bench can request an early hearing. It cannot order one. And nothing in the Supreme Court Rules says that a reference must be heard within any time at all.

Of the 19 references that have been decided in this period, half waited more than 5.7 years. Six waited more than 12. The five still pending have waited 3.4, 6.9, 6.9, 21.8 and 27 years.

The oldest is Arjun Flour Mills v. State of Orissa, n whether States can add a surcharge to sales tax. It was sent to seven judges on October 6, 1999. The seven-judge bench finally heard it and reserved judgment on September 22, 2026. N Ravi v. Speaker, Legislative Assembly, on whether a State Assembly’s privileges can override press freedom, was referred in December 2004 and was closed on October 6, 2026. The meaning of “industry” under the Industrial Disputes Act - a question that decides whether hospitals, universities and municipal bodies are covered by labour law - was sent up in May 2005 and answered by nine judges on August 20, 2026 in State of UP v. Jai Bir Singh. 46 other appeals waited with it.

Now look at the top of the chart. The right to privacy, in Justice KS Puttaswamy v. Union of India, went from a five-judge order to a nine-judge judgment in 37 days in 2017. Whether an unstamped arbitration agreement can be enforced, In re Interplay between the Arbitration Act and the Stamp Act, took 78 days in 2023. Whether a legislator who takes a bribe to vote is immune from prosecution, in Sita Soren v. Union of India, took 166 days.

The Court, in other words, can answer a reference in weeks. It can also leave one for a generation. What separates the two?

A 20-year wait could mean that nine judges sat and then struggled for years to agree. The record shows that almost never happens.

For nine of the decided references, I could find the exact day the larger bench first heard arguments. From that day, judgment came within a median of 156 days. The nine judges in Property Owners took 196 days. The seven in Aligarh Muslim University v. Naresh Agarwal took 304 days, the longest.

Before those first hearings, Property Owners waited 8,099 days. Jai Bir Singh waited 7,621. State of UP v. Lalta Prasad Vaish, on who may regulate industrial alcohol, waited 4,864. Mineral Area Development Authority v. Steel Authority of India, on whether royalty on minerals is a tax, waited 4,717. In each of these four, more than 97 per cent of the total time passed before any judge had heard a word.

This is the first thing the count shows and it changes the question. These were not difficult cases that took years to decide. They were cases nobody listed. The bench, once formed, worked fast. The delay was in forming it.

Since only the Chief Justice can form the bench, the natural next step is to line the 24 references up against the Chief Justices who held office.

From January 2010 to November 2022, under 11 Chief Justices, the Court decided five references to seven or more judges. In the two years that followed, under Chief Justice DY Chandrachud, it decided seven.

Four of those seven had been waiting between 5.7 and 22.7 years when he took office. The record shows exactly how they were cleared. On October 12, 2023, he listed six seven-judge and four nine-judge matters together, appointed a lawyer in each to prepare a common set of papers, gave three weeks for that to be done and announced the order of hearing. The hearings then ran back-to-back from October 2023 to May 2024. Judgments followed within four to ten months of each.

Under Chief Justices Anand, Balakrishnan, Kapadia and Gogoi, references were made and none were decided. Chief Justice Surya Kant, who took office in November 2025, told lawyers in open court in May 2026 that he was “going to set up seven-judge benches soon”. He has since listed the three oldest references on the list: Jai Bir Singh, decided in August; Arjun Flour Mills, reserved in September; and N Ravi, closed in October.

I want to be careful, because the chart invites a ranking and the data will not support one. 24 cases across 14 Chief Justices cannot separate the person from the circumstances. Chief Justice Chandrachud had a court of 34 judges, a two-year tenure and a backlog of references that were ready to hear. Several of his predecessors had smaller courts, heavier arrears and tenures of a few months. Chief Justice Lalit served 74 days. Nothing in the record shows that anyone acted wrongly.

But three things the record does show and they are enough.

First, the references that waited longest did not wait because they were hard. When finally listed, each one was argued and decided within a year.

Second, the wait ended when a Chief Justice chose to end it, by a dated, public act of listing with a timetable. It did not end because the Court got bigger. The Court’s strength went up in 2009 and again in 2019 and the number of references waiting grew after both.

Third, nothing required that act. Between 2002 and 2024, 18 Chief Justices held the roster while Property Owners waited. There is no public record of whether it was ever placed before any of them for directions. Nobody can now say what happened to it.

That is what “master of the roster” means in practice. It is not only a power over which judges hear a sensitive case. It is an unrecorded, unreviewable power over when the Supreme Court answers its own doubts about the law.

Until the larger bench speaks, the doubted ruling binds every court in India. For 21 years, labour courts decided whether a hospital or a university was an “industry” on a test that a five-judge bench had said in 2005 was causing a “docket explosion”. For 22 years, every challenge under Article 39(b) was tested against a reading that seven judges had said in 2002 they could not share. Those litigants were not parties to the reference. They lived under a rule the Supreme Court itself had flagged as doubtful, waiting for a bench no one was obliged to form.

In September 2026, in Jaya Thakur v. Union of India, a bench of the Court recorded that references had waited between five and twenty years and urged the Chief Justice to consider a permanent Constitution Bench. That would help with five-judge references, which are the most numerous. Three smaller steps would help with the seven and nine-judge ones; none of these touches the Chief Justice’s discretion.

1. A public register: The Court should publish, on its own website, every pending reference: the date of the referring order, the question, the bench size needed, the number of connected cases and the date of every listing. The Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy built such a tracker from outside; the Law Ministry compiled one for Parliament. Visibility is the only pressure the master of the roster is ever under, and today there is none.

2. A listing rule: The Supreme Court Rules could require a reference to seven or more judges to be listed for directions within a fixed time and let the referring bench record a date by which it asks for a hearing. This binds nobody. It creates a record.

3. An annual calendar: October 2023 showed that a backlog of large-bench references can be cleared in about a year when they are listed together with a timetable. That could happen every year, instead of once in a generation.

The lesson of the count is not that one Chief Justice was diligent and others were not. It is that the Supreme Court’s ability to correct its own law depends on a single office making an unrecorded choice and that for most of the last 26 years, that choice went the other way.

Shashank Shekhar is Ph.D. Scholar at Faculty of Law, Jamia Millia Islamia and teaches at Lloyd Law College.

This piece draws on his longer study titled Waiting for the Larger Bench: References, Delay and the Master of the Roster in the Supreme Court of India, 2000–2026. Charts are from the author’s dataset.

Views are personal.