Judicial reform shouldn’t stop at SC

The Union Cabinet’s decision to approve a Bill increasing the Supreme Court’s strength from 34 to 38 judges (including the Chief Justice of India) is a welcome step towards easing the backlog of cases before the apex court. However, without structural reforms, the judicial hours that the four new judges may contribute could be absorbed by the ever-expanding docket. According to the National Judicial Data Grid, as of May 7, the Supreme Court is burdened with over 93,000 pending cases — more than a 50 per cent increase since 2019, when the number of SC judges was last raised.

Pendency before the SC accounts for only about 0.14 per cent of total case pendency across all courts. This is negligible compared to around 12 per cent in the high courts and 88 per cent in the district courts. The SC mostly functions at or close to its sanctioned strength. SC judges dispose of roughly 90 per cent of the cases instituted each year. Additional judges or better calendar management may marginally ease the pressure on individual benches, but they cannot address the underlying reasons for mounting pendency: The Court’s expanding jurisdiction and the volume of litigation generated by the state, the country’s biggest litigant. Last year, Supreme Court Justice B V Nagarathna underscored this concern. She stressed the need for the government to “litigate with restraint and be a model litigator”.

Courts must keep pace with the rising volume of disputes accompanying population growth and expanding economic activity. At the apex court — the court of last resort — it is especially important to ensure that access to justice is given real meaning; prolonged incarceration of undertrials due to delays undermines this right. However, given the overwhelming volume of cases in district courts, a purely top-down approach to reform is unsustainable. Trial courts account for over 4.92 crore pending cases. Successive Law Commission reports have highlighted that India’s judge-population ratio, at roughly 19 judges per million people, remains far below that of countries such as the US and China, where the figure is about 150 per million. The move to increase the number of SC judges must therefore form part of a comprehensive plan to reduce pendency across the judicial system.