Pendency in the Supreme Court: What went wrong in the Registry?

Editors’ Note: Following publication of this article, which was authored by an external contributor, the Supreme Court Observer received email representations from individuals named in the article, raising concerns about factual inaccuracies.

As is standard practice, the article was fact-checked prior to publication against publicly available sources. On re-examination after receiving the first of these representations—and after considering the author’s responses to our post-publication queries—we concluded that certain revisions were necessary. We set out below the list of the principal revisions proposed. 

We drafted a ‘Corrections & Clarifications’ outlining key changes to the originally published version. The author preferred withdrawal of the article instead of publication in a revised form. Hence, the article was withdrawn on 5 January 2026. 

The article was edited, fact-checked and published by us in good faith, without malicious intent towards the author or any individual named in the article. We regret any oversight in the editing and fact-checking process and apologise to the readers for any inconvenience.

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The key revisions proposed were: 

1. Clarifying that the case clearance rate calculated for 2018–2025, based on information from the National Judicial Data Grid, pertains to ‘registered’ cases.
2. Including the names of the two Assistant Registrars who supervised the second phase of the pendency project.
3. Adding a paragraph to explain why the full salary of Registry law clerks was accounted for in computing the cost of the projects.
4. Dropping the contention that Registry law clerks prepared two to four times fewer briefs than residential law clerks, and were therefore less productive.
5. Further clarifying that the observation about individual judges’ preferred brief formats was a suggestion rather than a factual assertion, and dropping the following sentence: “It’s likely that the law clerks would have reworked or effectively redone the briefs prepared by the CRP in the format preferred by the judge.”
6. Adding a few words to acknowledge that the work of the law clerks was supervised by judicial officers, and to buttress the normative argument that judicial officers should also have been involved at the first stage of identifying listing-worthy cases.