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

The judiciary in India continues to struggle with pendency and delays, and the Supreme Court is no exception. This challenge is often framed as the responsibility of the sitting Chief Justice of India, who is the administrative head. However, pendency is more accurately diagnosed as an institutional problem requiring structural reforms, not personality-driven or tenure-bound interventions. 

Over the last three years, the Supreme Court Registry undertook two major exercises to tackle pendency. This article examines their effectiveness, limitations and the deeper accountability concerns they raise.

Rising pendency

According to the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG), as of 25 December 2025, 91,677 cases were pending before the Supreme Court. Of these, 21,775 are unregistered matters, i.e., cases filed with defects, missing documents or errors that remain unrectified and therefore not in judicial consideration yet. 

Excluding these, the number of cases ripe for hearing stands at 69,902. A further refinement emerges when tagged matters are separated out. As of February 2025, 23,886 cases were tagged to main matters, often arising from large or complex disputes where multiple parties file separate petitions on the same issue. Removing these tagged matters, we can say that around 46,000 cases require priority consideration. 

The Court’s strike rate isn’t so bad

As per the NJDG, between 2018 and 25 December 2025, the Court disposed of 3,18,689 cases against 3,28,357 filings—an annual average clearance rate of 97.1 percent. In the last three years (covering the tenures of Chief Justices Chandrachud, Khanna and Gavai), the clearance rate of registered cases exceeded or was close to 100 percent, meaning that more—or almost as many—cases were disposed of than were instituted.

The data suggests that the persistence of backlog is not for want of productivity but largely due to the rising rate of fresh filings. For instance, the increase in pendency during the tenure of CJI Gavai is not because of the disposal of fewer cases, but because 12,000 more cases were instituted this year as compared to last year. 

The Registry’s two projects

To address pendency, the Supreme Court Registry launched two projects. These projects involved preparing briefs for pending cases: 

1. SC-JUDICARE Project (June 2023–October 2024): The Supreme Court Chronicle newsletter (November 2024 Issue) records that under the JUDICARE project, a specialised team of 15 law researchers (fresh law graduates) worked under the leadership of then Centre for Research and Planning (CRP) Director, Dr. Sukhda Pritam and Research Consultant Amarendra Kumar. The researchers prepared briefs of several pending cases, which were then used by the supervisors to classify cases for urgent listing. Over 17 months, the Project resulted in the disposal of 3139 cases. 
2. Unclogging the Docket Report (November 2024–April 2025): The report suggests that the earlier JUDICARE project was stopped in October 2024. A new team of 20-25 law clerks and two Consultants worked under the leadership of then Deputy Registrar Kriti Sharma, an “academician trained in empirical studies”, to examine over 10,000 matters. This exercise classified 3374 main matters as short, infructuous or old. Of these, roughly 1500 matters were disposed of. The revised version of the “Unclogging the Docket” Report suggests that this project was halted when Justice Gavai assumed the office of the CJI.

The cost-benefit analysis

Under the JUDICARE project, on a conservative estimate, if each researcher received a prescribed salary of ₹80,000 per month, the combined cost for 15 researchers amounted to ₹12,00,000 per month and ₹2,04,00,000 over 17 months. Adding the Consultant’s salary of ₹1,25,000 per month (i.e., total ₹21,25,000 over the same period), the project incurred at least ₹2,25,25,000 (₹2.25 crore) in salaries alone, excluding administrative overheads and infrastructure. 

In the Unclogging the Docket project, on a conservative estimate, if 20 researchers were paid ₹80,000 per month and two consultants received ₹1,25,000 per month, the total monthly expenditure would amount to ₹18,50,000—₹16,00,000 for the researchers and ₹2,50,000 for the consultants. Over six months, this results in a total cost of ₹1,11,00,000 (₹1.11 crore).

Taken together, the Supreme Court Registry may have spent approximately ₹3.36 crore on these two projects—on salaries of contracted personnel alone. Yet, the combined disposal across these projects was a mere 5000 cases. Over this same period, according to data from the NJDG, the Court disposed of an average of 4300 cases per month (including disposals being credited to the Registry projects). 

Now, let’s compare this with CJI Gavai’s tenure, during which no special projects of the nature of JUDICARE or Unclogging the Docket were undertaken. The Court’s disposal numbers held up. According to figures pulled from the NJDG on 25 December 2025, between May and November 2025, 30,053 registered cases were disposed of against 31,253 filings, resulting in a registered case clearance rate of almost 100 per cent. The monthly disposal rate averaged almost 4300 cases despite more than two months’ worth of court vacation falling in this period (the summer recess, Dussehra, Diwali). 

These numbers should cause us to question the substantial public expenditure on initiatives that failed to outperform ordinary court functioning. 

No extra output

Let’s take a quick look at the listing and hearing practice of the Court currently. Each bench is slated to hear around 50 to 60 matters daily. Between Tuesdays and Thursdays, the Court primarily focuses on after-notice miscellaneous matters—these are cases where the Court has issued notice to the opposing party but a final judgement has not yet been reached. 

While Wednesdays and Thursdays were traditionally reserved for ‘Regular Hearing Matters’ (cases ready for final disposal), the Court has, in recent times, prioritised listing of the miscellaneous backlog on these days to reduce overall pendency. Fresh matters (matters for ‘admission’) are largely restricted to Mondays and Fridays.

When certain cases are given priority listing, as was done under the special initiatives, the total numbers of cases heard do not increase. Instead, the selected cases displace other cases that would have been listed in the normal course. Priority listing is, therefore, a zero-sum exercise. It rearranges the order of hearings without expanding the Court’s actual capacity. Any additional expenditure on such prioritisation must therefore be justified by better outcomes, which these projects failed to demonstrate.

Lack of planning

The Unclogging the Docket Report states that around 10,000 case files were processed for six months. Assuming 40,000 cases are processed over 24 months, a team of 20 researchers effectively produced about three briefs per researcher per day. 

When compared with the routine work of law clerks attached to judges’ residences, three briefs a day may not amount to much. If a judge’s prescribed five law clerks receive files of the 60-odd cases a day in advance, we can reasonably surmise that they are preparing briefs for around 12 cases a day on average. If they receive files a couple of days in advance, the workload still averages six briefs per researcher per day. This is achieved despite residential law clerks simultaneously performing other functions, including legal research, speech drafting and assisting with judgment preparation. 

Further, if the JUDICARE project itself failed to produce meaningful outcomes, there was little justification for replicating the same exercise during the Unclogging the Docket phase. Yet, the latter effectively mirrored the earlier approach, both in methodology and in institutional design, and unsurprisingly suffered from the same limitations. 

Duplication and misguided effort

In his message for the Report on Unclogging the Docket, Justice B.R. Gavai emphasised that the pendency problem is far larger than what short-term initiatives can address. He noted that such measures cannot be one-time exercises and called for a permanent team within the CRP dedicated to continuously identifying systemic causes of pendency and to implementing reforms. 

Now retired Justice Abhay Oka’s message noted that judges’ law clerks had evolved their own format of notes and preparing case briefs, and recommended the CRP obtain these formats from the private secretaries of the judges. This suggested that the special projects had not accounted for the fact that different judges prefer different formats for case briefs. 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. 

Further, instead of entrusting the task of identifying short, infructuous or listing-worthy matters to fresh law graduates, consultants and other young professionals, this exercise ought to have been carried out by judicial officers with training and experience in adjudication. It is ironic that the Registry brings several judicial officers on deputation, only to deploy them to functions such as protocol, building construction, medical administration or library management. 

A more rational approach would have been to assign pendency-reduction exercises to such officers, whose judicial training equips them to make calibrated assessments about which matters can be swiftly disposed of. Even retired district judges could have been engaged for the purpose. 

A robust Case Management System (CMS) is needed to auto-flag cases where, for example, the petitioner is deceased (linked to death registry databases) or where the prayer relates to a specific date that has passed (Justice Nagarathna highlighted certain election petitions as a category). The reliance on manual file-reading by researchers indicates a failure to leverage technological assets. 

Finally, given the Court’s already packed calendar, a more efficient alternative could have been to designate the second half of Mondays and Fridays for special benches. Perhaps a Special Bench could have sat on the first half of Saturday every week—for listing and disposal of matters like motor accident cases or maintenance disputes, which are relatively less time-consuming. 

Conclusion

Taken together, the Registry’s initiatives reflect a genuine desire to address pendency but also highlight the limits of short-term, human resource-intensive solutions undertaken without comprehensive planning or accountability mechanisms. 

Pendency is an institutional, not episodic, problem. It requires sustained investment in judicial capacity, structural reforms to filing and listing processes, strengthening of pre-registration scrutiny and greater reliance on trained judicial officers rather than ad hoc research teams. 

Until such long-term reforms are pursued, expensive short-term projects, even when undertaken with good intentions, may do little more than temporarily rearrange a backlog that continues to grow.

Surendra Kumar is an Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law and Philosophy at Ramaiah College of Law, Bengaluru.