Why ‘clearing the backlog’ won’t fix Indian Justice?

On Monday mornings in court, the day begins long before the first case is called. In a registrar’s chamber, a stack of freshly filed bail applications awaits inspection. Many were lodged late Friday evening – just in time to secure a Monday listing. By 10:15 am, the room is thick with paper and a quiet urgency.

Pages are stamped, indexed, and flipped through, only for the truth to emerge: some of these applications are incomplete, others frivolous, and a few are little more than tactical placeholders. This is not a quirk. It is a ritualized exploitation of procedure that turns justice into a waiting game, buying time and pushing courts into spending precious hours on cases that never stood a chance.

Behind each statistic lies a story: the rape victim waiting five years for trial, the entrepreneur whose contract dispute outlasts their business, the family whose property case becomes a multi-generational inheritance. The law treats these filings as the machinery of justice. But to the courts, they are grains of sand in the gears.

For decades, we’ve been told that the Indian judiciary’s greatest enemy is “backlog." The popular image is of files piling high, judges falling behind, and litigants trapped in endless queues. Therein lies the uncomfortable truth: in some jurisdictions, judges are disposing of cases faster than new ones are filed, and yet the pendency persists. It doesn't add up, and we need to dig deeper to unravel the systemic problems.

The crisis is not only one of capacity. It is one of design. We have created a structure that quietly rewards procedural gamesmanship over substance, demands impossible feats of cognition from its judges, and treats every case as if it begins from naught. A docket is meant to be the court’s memory; in practice, however, it is too often a filing cabinet that forgets.

This August 15th, as India marks seventy-eight years of independence, the symbolism is hard to miss. Freedom was never just about breaking colonial rule – it was about building institutions capable of delivering justice with fairness, speed, and clarity. Today, our judiciary needs its own kind of independence: freedom from inefficiency, from the silent theft of time, and from drowning in an ocean of unread pages.

For decades, we have treated “pendency” as the Rosetta Stone to understanding judicial efficiency. The number is neat, easy to count, and politically irresistible: fewer pending cases must mean a faster system, right? In reality, pendency is one of the most misleading indicators we have – a shadow on the wall that conceals more than it reveals.

The vacancy illusion

It is true, India's judge-to-population ratio is dismal – just 21 judges per 10 lakh people against the 50 judges per 10 lakh people recommended by the Law Commission in 1987. In some districts, one in four sanctioned judicial posts sits empty. This looks like the obvious culprit for delay. Yet, in States that have filled vacancies and even expanded judge strength, pendency has stubbornly persisted. The explanation is uncomfortable: raw capacity matters, but it is not the whole story.

A supply–demand mismatch in disguise

Pendency is as much a measure of demand for judicial time as it is of supply. Courts can clear every fresh filing and still see their backlog rise if mountains of old cases continue their glacial march forward. The case volume KPI (Key Performance Indicator) collapses new inflow, historical backlog, and litigation culture into one opaque number – telling us nothing about the quality of resolution or the proportion of judicial effort spent on cases that matter most.

The wrong cases in the wrong queues

Half of all pending matters in the lower judiciary are petty criminal offences – traffic challans, minor regulatory breaches – which often languish alongside complex civil or constitutional disputes. About one-fifth of civil pendency consists of land disputes, notorious for their procedural twists and layers of appeal. This is not just a volume problem; it is a triage problem. High-value, high-impact matters must compete for the same courtroom minutes as trivial ones, and pendency makes no such distinction.

The State as a serial litigant

The single largest clog in India’s judicial system is the government itself. We don’t have a public breakdown of who all the litigants are in India’s 50 million-odd pending cases, but research in Dr. Aparna Chandra’s book, “Court on Trial” puts the State in the dock in nearly 73% of matters before the Supreme Court. Ministries, departments, and PSUs churn out appeals like clockwork — often on settled points of law. The courts have called it out: in 2023, the Court slammed the Haryana Urban Development Authority for wasting public money, and remarked that 40% of frivolous litigation comes from the State. The Bombay High Court put it even plainer, calling out the State as “by far the largest litigant” and one that “most often seeks adjournments, frequently needlessly.”

Infrastructural ruins

Even where judicial appointments are aplenty and caseloads reasonable, the machinery around them often fails. Many courts lack functional digital filing, integrated case management, or sufficient administrative staff. Records fragment across paper and legacy software. Hearings collapse when basic document access fails. Without proper infrastructure, judicial capacity becomes water in a leaky vessel.

The fallacy of numeric comfort

Because pendency is so visible, it crowds out other, more telling metrics: average case duration by complexity, percentage of time lost to adjournments, or the share of judicial orders fully implemented. The truth is this: pendency is not a KPI of efficiency, it is a KPI of load. Treating it as the ultimate measure is like judging a hospital solely on the number of beds occupied. It tells us nothing about the quality of care, the speed of treatment for critical patients, or the system’s resilience under stress. Until we change what we measure, we won’t change what we manage.

The challenge lies in expanding the judicial bandwidth – giving each judge more usable hours on substance without cutting corners on process or fairness. This means reducing time lost to misdirected filings, repetitive fact-finding, and institutional amnesia.

This is where artificial intelligence, applied carefully, can help.

And we are not thinking of black-box algorithms deciding cases or replacing judges; we are reimagining the filing and review of all case work so that the registrars and judges can focus on the case at hand.

A Day in Tomorrow's Court

Imagine a judiciary where AI pre-screens filings for completeness and jurisdiction before they consume registry load or hearing slots, reducing wasted listings without violating adversarial principles. Where document intelligence systems distill hundreds of pages into key factual and legal issues, with instant cross-references to relevant statutes and precedents. Where pattern recognition flags repeat offenders exploiting procedure, and institutional memory surfaces case histories and past orders instantly – so no case story ever needs rebuilding from scratch.

During hearings, real-time systems could highlight contradictory submissions or departures from earlier pleadings. The result wouldn't be fewer cases on paper – it would be more judicial attention for legal issues that matter. A system that treats pendency of cases as backlog could use AI to redistribute that load intelligently, freeing scarce human cognition from endless repetitive reading and eventual burnout.

Technology as Force Multiplier

Technology isn't a silver bullet. We still need more judges, better infrastructure, and systemic reforms to litigation culture. But it's a force multiplier – one that can make every reform more effective.

There's deeper symbolism to making this leap on August 15. Independence isn't a static achievement; it's something each generation must renew by building institutions equal to its time. In 1947, the challenge before our nation’s forefathers was to craft a Constitution that could hold together India’s unparalleled diversity, rich heritage, and remarkable history under one democratic vision. In 2025, our challenge is to ensure that the Constitution's promise is fulfilled – that justice is accessible, timely, and fair.

At jhanaCourtroom, the goal is transforming the case bundles from passive archives into active intelligence systems, preserving judicial wisdom as living memory, and disentangling courts from bureaucratic inefficiency so they can focus on what truly matters, the dispensation of justice.

The promise isn't to replace judges, but to unburden them of their administrative efforts so they can focus on their case review - refreshing their memory through smart summaries, tagging their documents so they can easily view and access multiple documents at the same time, annotation capabilities to help them make their internal notes, making their files searchable, listing out the precedents cited, all simple fixes that make a monumental difference. For the first time, that promise is within reach.

On this August 15, as we celebrate 78 years of independence, let's commit to finishing what 1947 started. Our founders gave us the constitutional framework for justice. It's our turn to give that framework the technological backbone it needs to deliver on its promise –now.

If we get this right, the measure of our justice system won't be how many cases are pending, but how many citizens can say that justice was both done and seen to be done – before their hair turns gray, before their children inherit their legal battles, before hope itself becomes the casualty of institutional inertia.

The courts need their independence day. Let's give it to them.

Anya Batra is a Founding Member of jhana.ai