I Found Something Tragic in the Indian Judiciary’s Database
I wasn’t looking for this when I found it!
While going through data from the Indian judiciary for Courts & Cases, I came across something that stopped me.
Not a scandal. Not a leak. Just arithmetic — the kind that’s been sitting in public records the entire time, available to anyone who wanted to look.
Over the last 15 years, Indian courts have passed roughly 1.03 million judgments a year.
For the Judge Intel feature we were building — a tool that profiles judges based on their own published decisions, my curiosity led me to map how many judges have served the Supreme Court and High Courts combined since the founding of independent India’s judiciary in 1950.
The number: roughly 6,000.
Sit with that for a second
6000 judges. Across 75 years. Carrying a system that processes more than a million judgments annually — on top of whatever remains pending from the years before.
That’s not a small system straining under unusual pressure. That’s the baseline. That has been the baseline for a long time.
And yet the public conversation about the judiciary almost never includes this. What it includes, with predictable regularity, is outrage about “court holidays.”
Every few months, the same cycle repeats: a headline about how many days the judiciary is “off,” a wave of commentary about how the backlog keeps growing, a sense that judges aren’t working hard enough, that something needs to be “done.”
I want to add something to that conversation that rarely comes up: the law.
What the Constitution actually says
Article 124(1) establishes the Supreme Court of India — and crucially, it does not give the judiciary the authority to decide how many judges sit on it. That authority belongs to Parliament. The judiciary cannot expand its own bench. It can request, it can recommend, but it cannot legislate its own capacity. The most recent change to the Supreme Court’s sanctioned strength came through parliamentary amendment, raising the number of judges from 34 to 38.
Get Astha Jain’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Article 130 governs where the Supreme Court sits. Even this — the physical seat of the country’s highest court — is not the judiciary’s unilateral decision. The Chief Justice of India may recommend, but it requires the President’s approval to take effect. Repeated recommendations by the law commission, have been in vain.
The judiciary does not control its own headcount. The judiciary does not control its own physical infra decisions. The judiciary interprets and applies the law — but the structural capacity to do that work, at scale, sits with a different organ of government.
What this means for the backlog conversation
So the next time the conversation turns to a “broken” judiciary — the cases that continue for years, sometimes decades, the undertrials who wait without resolution, the backlog that keeps climbing no matter what anyone does — it’s worth asking a different question than the one usually asked.
Not “why isn’t the judiciary is lagging or not doing more?”
But: if a structure is carrying more weight than it was built for, what actually breaks?
The answer isn’t the judiciary. The answer is the assumption that the judiciary alone is responsible for fixing this.
This is the separation of power doing exactly what it was designed to do. Three organs, each with bounded authority, each dependent on the others to function. The judiciary interprets. The legislature decides capacity and structure. The executive implements. When one organ is under strain, the system’s design means the others have to respond — and when that response is slow, the strain shows up as backlog, as pendency, as headlines about overworked or underworked courts depending on who’s writing them.
That interdependence is the system’s strength. It’s also, in moments exactly like this, its bottleneck.
The part that actually matters
I didn’t set out to write a piece defending the judiciary, and this isn’t quite that. It’s closer to an observation about how public conversation works when the underlying data and the underlying law aren’t part of it.
Most discourse about the judiciary — online, in op-eds, GDs — happens without the data. It happens almost entirely without reference to what the Constitution actually allocates to whom. People have strong opinions about an institution whose actual operating constraints they haven’t looked at.
That gap is part of what motivated building Judge Intel and the broader judgment database behind Courts & Cases in the first place — not as commentary on the system, but as infrastructure for the people who work inside it every day: advocates who need to understand precedent, judicial reasoning, and the realities of the courts they appear before, grounded in actual records rather than assumption.
If you can sit with this analogy — a structure carrying weight it wasn’t resourced for, by organs that don’t have full control over their own capacity — I think you understand the system in parts. That feels like a better starting point than outrage.
Courts & Cases is an AI-powered legal research and drafting platform for Indian advocates, built on 1.8M+ Supreme Court and High Court judgments.
