By Nisha Singh
There is a particular cruelty in a justice system that makes people choose between fighting for their rights and actually living their lives. In India, millions have stopped choosing because the system made that choice for them decades ago.
As of March 2026, over 55.8 million cases are pending across Indian courts, with more than 85% concentrated in district courts alone. Among them, over 180,000 cases have been rotting for more than 30 years. Let that number sink in.
“Children who were born when those cases were filed now have children of their own. The original plaintiffs are, in many instances, dead”.
The national average disposal time sits at approximately 9 years, with subordinate courts stretching that to 10. In Uttar Pradesh, carrying the heaviest burden of any state, the average disposal time is 11.5 years. And the pile is still growing. Between 2018 and 2025, new cases filed every year outstripped those disposed of in most years.
“Courts are not clearing the queue. They are lengthening it”.
THE DIVORCE TRAP
Few areas expose this cruelty more nakedly than family law. When a marriage collapses, what a person needs above everything else is closure, the ability to grieve, heal, and move forward. Instead, Indian courts hand them a decade-long ordeal. Contested divorces routinely last 2 to 5 years at minimum, before appeals, adjournments, and the grinding ritual of missed dates are even factored in.
“People spend their 30s and 40s in legal purgatory, unable to remarry, unable to settle finances, unable to breathe”.
The Karnataka High Court recently felt compelled to state what should never have needed stating: matrimonial disputes should be decided within one year, "so that parties can restructure their lives." The court quoted Thomas Carlyle, "Life is lost in living." That a High Court needed to make this argument in 2025, citing a 19th-century historian, says everything about how far we have not come.
THE UNDERTRIAL SCANDAL
The injustice cuts deeper when you step inside India's prisons. Undertrials, people not yet convicted of any crime, legally innocent by every constitutional standard, make up around 74% of India's prison population. Nearly 3 in 4 inmates are still awaiting trial. Delhi's prisons alone hold 17,178 undertrials against just 2,232 convicted prisoners.
These are not people freed on acquittal. These are people warehoused by the state, fed on taxpayer money, stripped of their livelihoods, their families, their years, while the system decides, eventually, whether they did anything wrong at all. By 2021, nearly 30% of all undertrials had spent over a year behind bars, up from 22% a decade earlier. The trend moves only one way.
And then there are the genuinely guilty, men convicted of rape, murder, and organised crime whose appeals wander through the Sessions Courts, High Courts, and the Supreme Court for 20 and 30 years.
“The state feeds them. The victim waits. The taxpayer pays for both”.
EFFORTS EXIST. THEY ARE NOT ENOUGH.
To be fair, the system is not standing still. Post-COVID, virtual hearings reduced some backlog in commercial matters. The eCourts Phase III initiative aims to digitise half of all courts by 2026. The National Judicial Data Grid now tracks pendency in real time. Fast-Track Special Courts for POCSO and rape cases have disposed of over 300,000 matters since 2019. These are genuine efforts, and they remain thoroughly insufficient against a problem of this scale. Tinkering at the edges of a 55 million-case backlog is not reform. It is optics.
WHAT REAL JUSTICE LOOKS LIKE
The Harshad Mehta securities scam, as widely reported, took 6 years to reach a verdict by which time Mehta had died in custody. The Nick Leeson scandal in Singapore, of comparable complexity, was resolved in 2 years. Singapore's courts today operate on timelines measured in months. The UK's Crown Court targets the resolution of serious cases within 6 months. Germany disposes of most criminal matters within a year.
The difference is not just money; it is architecture. Singapore and Estonia rebuilt their justice systems around technology, hard deadlines, and judicial accountability. India runs its High Courts at 33% vacancy and subordinate courts at 21% vacancy. We are attempting to drain a flood through a pipe we have not bothered to repair.
A DEMAND, NOT JUST A LAMENT
At the current disposal rate, clearing India's backlog would take hundreds of years. That figure comes not from critics, but from the system's own data.
The time for commissions and carefully worded concern is over. Parliament must legislate mandatory case-disposal timelines with binding consequences, not guidelines, not recommendations, but enforceable law. Criminal trials, divorce proceedings, and property disputes must each carry hard deadlines modelled on UK and German frameworks. Traffic violations, minor civil disputes, and routine regulatory matters must be moved entirely to online tribunals and administrative courts, freeing judicial benches for cases that genuinely require them. AI-driven scheduling must replace the colonial-era practice of manual listing that allows cases to vanish into adjournment limbo for years. Judges must be appointed against an actual vacancy. And performance metrics with full safeguards for judicial independence must become part of how we assess and resource the system.
The Constitution promises speedy justice. 55 million pending cases are not a delay. They are a repudiation of that promise carried out quietly, year after year, while the people who built this country stand in line and grow old, waiting for it to keep its word.
Nisha Singh is a policy analyst under MSDE, working at the intersection of skilling, employability and workforce development. Views expressed are her own.
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