What’s in a name?

‘What’s in a name?’ This line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juilet comes to mind in light of the recent move by the Supreme Court to rename its Vacation Benches as Partial Court Working Days Benches (abbreviated as PCWDB—quite the alphabet soup).

Every summer, the Supreme Court substantially reduces the number of working benches to allow judges a rotational break during a seven-week vacation. Commentators come down on what they consider to be an unconscionably long break (with the 80,000-plus pendency figure often cited), unavailable to others in essential professions like military and medicine.

A closer look suggests that though the Court may have officially done away with the word ‘vacation’, with its associated evocation of idleness and languor, it may not be enough to bat away the “feeling among the people of India” (a phrase used by former Law Minister Kiren Rijiju in Parliament) that the Court needs to be more ‘productive’.

On 21 May, the Court announced that 21,651 miscellaneous matters (MMs) and 17,088 regular hearing matters (RHMs) had been notified for potential listing during the partial working days. Yet, when the actual lists were released, only 1,630 MMs and 733 RHMs were scheduled. Some lawyers continued to opt out of hearings during this period, prompting Chief Justice Gavai to remark that judges have to take the slack for lawyers being “unwilling” to work during the vacation.

This year, in an unusual gesture, the CJI and four senior-most judges continued working through the first week of the vacation. They were joined by five other judges across five Division Benches. On their first day in office on 30 May, the three new judges joined benches led by the three senior-most judges. Over the remaining six weeks, 16 more benches—each with two judges—will function in rotation. Two of those weeks will have two benches; four will have three benches each. There will be one more bench compared to last year’s vacation.

Rijiju’s unsubstantiated ‘feeling among the people’ remark echoed older, flawed assumptions by the Malimath Committee and the Law Commission, which had linked long vacations to case pendency. In 2013, then Law Minister Ashwani Kumar had admitted that no study had ever been conducted to determine whether longer court hours would reduce pendency.

The 133rd Report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Law and Justice, published in August 2023, suggested staggered vacations as in many other public institutions. However, this suggestion overlooks the way the Court functions: cases are heard by designated combinations of judges and staggered leave could disrupt hearings.

Some members of the Committee had defended the current system, emphasising the legal profession’s unique nature, which requires a high level of intellectual engagement and periodic rejuvenation. The report stressed that vacations are not the main cause of judicial delays.

Yet, superficial critiques keep cropping up. An article on Livemint likened courts to police stations and hospitals, questioning their right to take extended breaks. Such analogies reveal a shallow grasp of the judicial function, which requires reams of reading, sustained intellectual effort and careful reasoning.

The analogies also reflect the grounding of the discourse in polemic. What we really need are more empirical studies on just how much vacations affect court output. The results may be surprising. For example, a study using a dataset from the Bombay High Court reached the conclusion that “court vacations will not make a significant difference to the disposal rates or the disposal duration of cases.”

This is not to say that the Court needn’t introspect. For instance, it could have considered the Supreme Court Bar Association’s suggestion, made in 2021, to expand the category of matters for listing before the PCWDBs. But this year, it has simply republished a circular from January 2019 without any changes.

It’s easy—and often accurate when writing about Indian public institutions—to lapse into the aphorism ‘the more things change, the more they remain the same.’ But if the genuine intent of the discourse is to push the Court towards reform beyond name changes, then even the terms of the debate ought to become more data-driven to be ‘productive’.

This article was first featured in SCO’s Weekly newsletter. Sign up now!

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