Every litigant in India has a stake in reducing court pendency. The Union government is no different, except that it is simultaneously one of the largest sources of that pendency and the body with the power to address it. Tribunalisation has long been the proposed remedy, but the manner of its implementation has attracted repeated judicial intervention.
Three successive attempts have been struck down on the same ground: that the government's reforms gave itself overbroad rule-making power over appointments and service conditions to tribunals before which it is itself frequently a litigant. The Tribunals Reforms Act, 2026 is the fourth attempt.
This piece asks whether the Union government's reforms meet the standard the Supreme Court has set, across four judgments, for when a legislative response to a struck-down provision is constitutionally adequate. On the letter of what the Court has struck down, they do, however on the broader principle those provisions were meant to serve, they do not.
Tribunalisation in India began with the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976, which empowered Parliament to create administrative tribunals for government service disputes. Parliament followed with the Administrative Tribunals Act, 1985, establishing the Central Administrative Tribunal and its state counterparts, and initially directed appeals straight to the Supreme Court, bypassing High Courts entirely. The Supreme Court addressed this twice. First, in SP Sampath Kumar v. Union of India (1987), it held that tribunals could substitute for High Courts only if their composition gave litigants judicial-level independence. Then, in L Chandra Kumar v. Union of India (1997), a seven-judge bench held that judicial review under Articles 226, 227 and 32 is part of the Constitution's basic structure and cannot be excluded. Every tribunal order thus became subject to High Court writ jurisdiction.
As India's economy grew, so did the number of subject-specific tribunals, without a common framework for who staffs them. The Law Commission's 272nd Report (2017) documented this inconsistency and recommended uniformity. The government's response, Part XIV of the Finance Act, 2017, merged several tribunals and gave the Centre rule-making power over appointments and service conditions through Section 184.
That power became the subject of four consecutive Supreme Court interventions, and it is in these judgments that the standard against which the 2026 Act must be measured takes shape. In Rojer Mathew v. South Indian Bank Ltd. (2019), the Court struck down the 2017 Rules, finding the selection committees structurally weighted toward the executive. In Madras Bar Association v. Union of India (2020), it struck down the replacement rules and, for the first time, directed the government to constitute an independent National Tribunals Commission, holding also that a four-year tenure was too short to secure independence. In a second Madras Bar Association decision (2021), the Court struck down the Ordinance's fifty-year age bar, its two-name selection panel, its "preferably three months" appointment timeline, and the four-year tenure once more. Crucially, this is where the Court articulated the test that governs everything since then: that Parliament may legislatively override a judgment only by curing the defect identified, not by re-enacting it under a different statutory head.
The government's next attempt, the Tribunals Reforms Act, 2021, failed that test. In November 2025, the Court found that the 2021 Act had substantially reproduced the same provisions already struck down a year earlier and held that relocating an invalidated provision into a new statute does not cure it. It directed that the National Tribunals Commission be constituted within four months. The Commission was finally established with the enactment of the Tribunals Reforms Act, 2026, which received presidential assent on August 13, 2026.
Measured provision by provision, the 2026 Act responds more precisely than any of its predecessors. Member tenure is now fixed at five years instead of four. Selection committees now recommend one name plus a waitlisted candidate, instead of a panel of two. The government must act on a recommendation within three months, as a mandatory requirement. The fifty-year age floor is gone. And Chapter II finally establishes the National Tribunals Commission the Court first ordered in 2020, comprising a retired judge as Chairperson, two Judicial Members, and two Technical Members. On the face of it, every defect the Court identified has been addressed on the text.
However, the four judgments were never only about these individual provisions. Underneath the age bar, the panel size, and the tenure length ran a common thread, that the executive should not dominate the process of selecting adjudicators before whom it is itself a frequent litigant. Measured against that broader principle, the Act's compliance looks less complete.
Two provisions of the Act illustrate this gap. First, while the Commission's Chairperson and Judicial Members require consultation with the Chief Justice of India, its two Technical Members do not, and Technical Members sit with full voting rights on every selection committee alongside a government Secretary who also votes. In effect, the executive retains an unreviewed hand in selecting two of the five people who will decide who staffs every tribunal in the country, and a further vote on every individual selection committee, which appears to be the same unchecked control over appointments the Court has repeatedly held incompatible with tribunal independence.
Second, disciplinary complaints against tribunal members are first screened by the Ministry that administers the tribunal in question, before the Commission's own inquiry begins, meaning the executive decides whether a complaint against an adjudicator is even worth pursuing before an independent body examines it at all. While neither feature has been put to judicial scrutiny yet, both would be difficult to defend if measured against the broader principle espoused by the Court.
Moreover, large parts of the Act, including the qualification and service-condition framework for members, are left to rules that are yet to be notified. Until the Act is brought fully into force and those rules are framed, any assessment of the compliance discussed above can only be confined to the bare text of the Act, not how it will operate in practice.
On the text, the Union has finally met the Court's standard on the points it chose to address. Whether this proves sufficient will depend on whether the underlying principle the Court has repeated across four judgments, that the executive must not control who judges its own disputes, has actually been honoured. While the letter of the Court's prior directions has been met, the spirit behind them has not, at least not on the text alone. After four attempts, the government is closer than it has ever been, but it is not there yet.
About the author: Jai Raina is a Senior Associate at AP & Partners.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s). The opinions presented do not necessarily reflect the views of Bar & Bench.
If you would like your Deals, Columns, Press Releases to be published on Bar & Bench, please fill in the form available here.