Litigation overload: It’s time for the state to rest its case

India has 54 million pending cases, 47 million in district courts, 6.3 million in high courts and nearly 90,000 in the Supreme Court, with just 25,000 judges to handle them.

- ADITYA SINHA

This translates to barely 21 judges per million people, far below the Law Commission’s recommended 50 and well short of the US (107) and UK (51). Vacancies hover around 30% in many high courts and case disposal rates remain sluggish, averaging 1,350 cases per judge annually, versus over 2,000 in OECD jurisdictions. Each adjournment adds several months to case duration: over 18 million cases are more than three years old and 5 million exceed a decade. Judicial inefficiency has thus become both a governance and economic problem, conservatively estimated by Niti Aayog to shave 1.5% off GDP annually through delayed contract enforcement, locked capital and investor uncertainty.

Behind this inefficiency lies an even deeper structural distortion: the state itself. The Union government, public sector undertakings (PSUs), state governments, state PSUs and local bodies together account for nearly half of all litigation nationwide. At the Union level, according to Legal Information Management and Briefing System (LIMBS), the finance ministry alone is party to nearly 200,000 pending cases, 98,544 before tribunals, 83,552 in high courts and 12,589 in the Supreme Court, representing roughly 13% of the top court's burden. Tax and revenue disputes dominate, but the government's litigation footprint extends across civil contracts, land acquisition and service matters. Although monetary thresholds for appeals were raised in 2022 (to ₹ 1 crore for high courts and ₹ 2 crore for the Supreme Court), pendency reduction has been marginal, reflecting a culture of litigation as bureaucratic insurance rather than legal necessity.