When Justice Waits: The Crisis of Delay in India's Courts

A democracy is ultimately judged not only by the laws it enacts but by how swiftly and fairly those laws are enforced. In India, this test is now being failed in slow motion.

The National Judicial Data Grid reports over 5.1 crore cases pending across all courts as of December 2025, with district courts alone holding 4.69 crore. That turns the constitutional promise of speedy justice into a distant ideal for millions.

Illustration by The Geostrata

Every statistic hides a human story. A young undertrial waiting years in jail for a trial that never seems to begin, a family locked in an inheritance dispute for decades, a small business ruined because a contract case does not move beyond the first few hearings.

These are not outliers but symptoms of a system that is struggling to keep pace with the society it is meant to serve. The Indian judiciary, often described as the guardian of constitutional rights, is weighed down by chronic delays that slowly erode public faith. Even at the very top, the Supreme Court alone had over 88,000 pending cases by August 2025.

THE BUILD-UP OF THE CRISIS

This crisis is not the result of one sudden failure. It is a slow buildup over decades. A system designed for a much smaller caseload is now expected to carry far more than it was ever prepared for.

The population has grown, economic activity has expanded, and citizens are more aware than ever of their rights. Laws have multiplied, and new rights-based frameworks have been created, which in itself reflects a more ambitious reading of the Constitution.

Yet the basic architecture of courts, the number of judges, and the way cases are managed have not grown at the same speed.

Courts that were supposed to be the first and most accessible refuge of the citizen have turned into institutions that many now approach with hesitation, knowing that filing a case is only the beginning of a very long wait. At the core lies a very simple mismatch between demand and capacity. India has about 15 judges per million people, while most experts argue that the system needs at least three times that number.

Even the posts that are officially sanctioned are not fully occupied, because appointments are delayed and vacancies remain open for months or even years. High Courts routinely function with around a fifth of their sanctioned strength missing. District judges often handle thousands of cases in a year.

When so few judges are available to hear a rising flood of cases, each individual judge ends up carrying an impossible load. Case files pile up, hearings are short and fragmented, and adjournments become routine because there is no realistic way to give each matter the time it deserves.

HOW DELAY PLAYS OUT IN DAILY COURT LIFE

Numbers tell only part of the story. On a normal working day in a typical Indian court, the reality of delay is visible everywhere. Many courts still function with skeletal staff and cramped infrastructure.

Courtrooms are overcrowded, files are stacked on the floor, and basic facilities are often missing. A significant share of courts do not have proper e-filing systems.

Files go missing. Orders take time to be typed and communicated. Hearing dates are given months apart. In this environment, lawyers learn to treat adjournments as a normal part of strategy rather than an exception. If a witness is missing, if a lawyer is engaged in another court, or if the paperwork is not fully ready, the easy option is to ask for another date. Courts, aware of how overloaded they are, grant these adjournments with little resistance. Time itself slowly turns into a weapon.

Those with money and stamina can afford to wait, to hire lawyers, to pay for each fresh application, to stretch the case until the other side loses patience or resources. For a poor litigant, the cost is much higher.

It is not just legal fees but repeated travel, lost wages from missing work, and the constant mental stress of living with an unresolved case. The structure of the legal process often makes this worse. Indian law is full of multiple stages and layers. There are detailed procedures, several opportunities to appeal, and many points at which a case can be slowed down on technical grounds.

In theory, all of this is meant to protect fairness and give every party a genuine chance to be heard. In practice, a simple dispute can turn into a long journey without a clear end date. Criminal cases get stuck because investigations move slowly, charge sheets are filed late, or witnesses do not appear on time.

Civil suits become bogged down in interim applications and technical objections. Over time, property values change, parties pass away, and documents disappear. A case that began in one social and economic reality is decided in a completely different one, sometimes decades later.

THE HUMAN AND ECONOMIC TOLL

Over the years, the culture inside the system has adjusted itself to this delay instead of resisting it. There is often no strong pressure to finish a trial within a fixed timeline. Adjournments are handed out casually. Penalties for wasting the court’s time are rare.

Proper case management, where judges actively plan the life cycle of a case and set clear milestones, is still not the norm in most trial courts.

The result is a kind of drift. Everyone involved knows that the case will take time, and that shared expectation itself becomes a silent permission for even more delay. When delay becomes normal, no single actor feels responsible for it.

This is where the phrase “justice delayed is justice denied” becomes painfully real. For an undertrial in prison, every extra month behind bars without conviction is a part of life that cannot be returned. Many of them eventually walk free, but only after spending years inside without a final verdict.

For a woman pursuing a domestic violence or maintenance case, years of waiting can mean living in fear or in financial uncertainty. For people fighting land or inheritance disputes, the case becomes a permanent shadow over their home and livelihood. By the time a final judgment arrives, the harm has often already become permanent. There is also a quieter but equally serious consequence. As courts become slower, ordinary people start losing faith in them.

Some try to avoid formal legal routes altogether and rely instead on informal settlements or local power structures. Others assume that only those with influence and money can actually get results.

Over time, this weakens the idea of the state as a neutral and reliable guarantor of rights. On paper, citizens may still have a long list of constitutional protections. In practice, they begin to feel that those rights cannot be enforced in time to matter.

The economic cost of delay is just as real. Investors, businesses and workers all depend on predictable enforcement of contracts and property rights. If a commercial dispute is likely to take a decade to resolve, it naturally changes how companies plan, where they choose to invest, and how comfortable they feel taking risks. Insolvency and company law cases that drag on keep “zombie” firms alive, locking up assets that could have been used more productively. Studies estimate that delays in the justice system shave a noticeable share off India’s growth each year.

A slow judiciary does not just hurt individual litigants. It acts like a hidden tax on the entire economy by adding uncertainty, higher transaction costs and long waiting times to any activity that depends on legal enforcement.

REFORMS SO FAR: PROGRESS AND LIMITS

To be fair, it is not as if nothing has been done. Over the past decade, there has been a visible push towards using technology and alternative mechanisms to speed things up. The e Courts project, now in its third phase, aims to create a more seamless digital environment through online filing, digital case records, and video conferencing.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many courts switched to virtual hearings, and judges managed to dispose of a significant number of matters despite lockdowns.

Special fast-track courts have been created for certain categories of cases, like sexual offences, and Lok Adalats and mediation centres have been encouraged to resolve appropriate disputes outside the regular court process.

These are all important and necessary steps. They make the system more transparent, reduce some physical barriers, and clear certain types of cases more quickly. But they sit on top of a structure that is still heavily burdened. Digitising a file does not automatically change how often a case is adjourned.

A video hearing still needs everyone to be present and prepared. A fast-track court might move one kind of case faster, but it cannot compensate for the sheer volume of other matters that continue to crawl through ordinary courts. Technology can act like a lubricant in a rusty machine. It can reduce friction, but it cannot replace missing parts or fix the basic design.

CONCLUSION

Any honest discussion about judicial delay in India has to hold two truths together. On the one hand, many judges work under enormous pressure. They handle dozens of matters in a single day, carry files home, and are constantly in the public eye. On the other hand, the institution as a whole is not delivering justice in time for millions of people.

At current rates of disposal, some estimates suggest that it would take centuries to clear the existing backlog if no new cases were filed. That is simply not acceptable for a country that aspires to be a leading democracy and a major economic power.

The way forward will require more than cosmetic reform. Vacancies need to be filled on a war footing. Outdated laws and procedures must be simplified so that cases can move with fewer technical roadblocks.

District and subordinate courts, which carry the bulk of the pendency, need better infrastructure, more staff and modern case management tools. Alternative dispute resolution should become the first instinct for suitable matters, not a last resort when the regular system has already failed. Most importantly, the culture around delay must change.

Every adjournment should be a matter of exception, not habit. Every day of pendency should be treated as a real cost borne by a real person. Until that happens, the figure of 5.1 crore pending cases will continue to stand as a quiet but powerful indictment of how far India still has to go in turning its constitutional promise of justice into something that is not just written in law, but actually felt in the lives of its citizens.

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BY SIDDHI KHURANA

CENTRE FOR POLITICS AND LAW

TEAM GEOSTRATA

info@thegeostrata.com