The judiciary of the “worlds largest democracy” is failing miserably.
There’s something uncomfortable about criticising the institution you want to build a career inside. You worry it looks ungrateful, or naive, or like you don’t understand how things work.
But I think that discomfort is exactly the problem. Too many people who know exactly what’s wrong with Indian courts have decided that speaking up isn’t worth the trouble. Lawyers who’ve watched colleagues get contempt notices for a tweet. Judges who wait until retirement to say anything real. Law students who learn quickly that the right career move is to keep your head down.
I don’t want to start my legal career like that.
So here it is: the Indian judiciary is in serious trouble. Failing the farmer waiting a decade for a land dispute to be heard. Failing the undertrial prisoner who’s been in jail longer than his alleged crime would have put him there. Failing the people who walk into a courtroom believing, still, that the law will treat them fairly.
Fifty Million Pending Cases.
As of 2024, there are over 50 million pending cases in Indian courts. The Supreme Court has more than 80,000 cases sitting in its backlog. High Courts are holding nearly 60 lakh. And the district courts, where most Indians will ever actually step foot, carry the rest.
I don’t think we let ourselves properly feel how absurd that number is. These aren’t files. They’re people. People who filed a case, paid a lawyer, showed up, and are now just… waiting. Some of them have been waiting longer than I’ve been alive.
The reason isn’t complicated. India has 21 judges per million people. The Law Commission said we need 50. Thousands of judicial posts are sitting vacant right now , not because there’s no one to fill them, but because the process of filling them is buried under a pile of bureaucratic back-and-forth between high court collegiums and state governments that nobody seems particularly urgent about fixing. At the current rate of disposal, several High Courts would need decades to clear their backlogs even if not a single new case came in tomorrow. The Allahabad High Court has the largest by caseload in the entire world. It routinely sees litigants die before their matters are decided.
The Supreme Court has held that a speedy trial is a fundamental right under Article 21. The same court has an 80,000-case backlog. I’m not sure how we’re supposed to sit with that contradiction without it bothering us.
The Corruption in Judiciary
Ask any young lawyer about their first week inside a district court and they’ll tell you things that aren’t in any textbook. Which clerk you need to know to get your matter listed without waiting six months. Whose number to have saved if you need a date changed. The way certain interim orders seem to have a logic that has nothing to do with the law.
A 2005 study by the Centre for Media Studies, published by Transparency International India, found that 80% of those who had interacted with courts believed the judiciary was corrupt, and estimated that Indians paid Rs. 2,630 crore annually in bribes to the lower judiciary alone. That was twenty years ago. The structures that made it happen — underpaid court staff, zero oversight, no way to complain without making an enemy are still largely intact.
Higher up, it gets subtler and in some ways worse. Everyone in legal circles knows about the “uncle judge” problem. Lawyers who happen to have a relative on the bench winning cases at rates that stretch credulity, while the rest of the bar watches and says nothing because what exactly are you going to do about it? Then there’s the collegium: a system where Supreme Court judges pick their own successors in closed-door deliberations, with no obligation to explain why one person was chosen over another. When Parliament passed the National Judicial Appointments Commission in 2015 — an attempt to bring some transparency to the process , the Supreme Court struck it down. The court decided, essentially, that it would continue to choose itself. I challenge anyone to name another democracy where that’s considered acceptable.
And then there’s 2019. A sitting Chief Justice of India faced a sexual harassment allegation. A bench he headed took suo motu cognizance of the matter, framing it as an attack on judicial independence. The woman who came forward faced retaliation. Nothing happened to anyone who mattered. If that had happened in any other institution: a corporation or a university, there would have been consequences. Because it was the Supreme Court, there weren’t.
A Court That Thinks It’s Above the Classroom
The Supreme Court takes the word “supreme” in its name very seriously : in February 2026, the court banned an NCERT Class 8 Social Science textbook.
The reason? The textbook had a chapter called “The Role of the Judiciary in Our Society” and somewhere in it, it mentioned that corruption, pendency, and shortage of judges were challenges facing Indian courts. The court did not ask for a review. It did not call for a correction. It issued show-cause notices to the Secretary of School Education and the NCERT Director asking why criminal contempt proceedings should not be initiated against them. It ordered every physical copy seized and every digital version taken down.
What makes this particularly extraordinary is that the textbook was not citing opinions. It was citing government numbers. These are figures that the Law Minister himself had stated on the floor of the Lok Sabha. Between 2016 and 2025, 8,639 complaints were received against sitting judges. In 2024 alone, 1,170 complaints were registered — the highest in any single year. The textbook put those numbers in front of thirteen-year-olds. The Supreme Court decided that thirteen-year-olds shouldn’t know.
Think about what that means. The court that is supposed to uphold the right to information, to education, to free expression used its contempt powers to stop children from learning that courts have problems. Not false information. Not propaganda. Government statistics, in a government published textbook, about a government institution. Banned.
And if you’re wondering whether this is consistent with the Prashant Bhushan contempt case. Perfectly, depressingly consistent. The pattern is the same: any acknowledgment that the judiciary is imperfect, from any source, in any format, gets treated as an attack to be crushed rather than a criticism to be considered.
When Protection Becomes a Weapon
I want to be careful with this section, because it’s easy to get it wrong and because the issue genuinely matters.
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Women in India face real, serious, chronic violence whether its at home, at work or in public. The laws that exist to protect them: Section 498A on dowry harassment, the Domestic Violence Act, POCSO were passed because those crimes were happening and being ignored. They were necessary. They remain necessary.
But here’s the thing about 498A specifically: it’s a cognizable, non-bailable offence. Which means the moment a complaint is filed, the accused can be arrested. No warrant. No preliminary inquiry. No filter between allegation and handcuffs. The Supreme Court itself said in Arnesh Kumar v. State of Bihar (2014) that the section was being “used as a tool for personal vendetta and settling of scores.” NCRB data has consistently shown a high proportion of these cases ending in acquittal or discharge.
The problem isn’t that the law exists. It’s that a law with no cost for misuse, no preliminary screening, and immediate life-altering consequences for the accused — job gone, reputation gone, entire family dragged in will inevitably be misused. And when it is, it doesn’t only hurt the people it’s wrongly applied to. It erodes the credibility of every genuine complaint that follows.
And then there is the question of who is sitting on the bench deciding these cases. In September 2024, Karnataka High Court Judge Justice Vedavyasachar Srishananda was caught on video making a sexist remark to a female lawyer , telling her, in open court, that she seemed to know so much about him she might even reveal the colour of his undergarments. This wasn’t a private slip of the tongue. It was on camera, in a courtroom, directed at a practicing lawyer doing her job. The judge later apologised, but that’s almost beside the point. The fact that a sitting High Court judge felt comfortable saying something like that in public, on the record tells you everything about the culture the institution has allowed to take root inside itself. It fits with a broader, dismal picture.
Out of 719 sitting High Court judges across India, only 99 are women. At the Supreme Court level, the numbers are even worse. An institution that looks nothing like the society it serves, and where the people on the bench have sometimes shown they hold views that belong in a different century, is going to struggle to deliver justice equally. That’s not an opinion. It’s a structural reality
Protecting the vulnerable and not creating new victims aren’t opposing goals. A well-designed law does both. Right now, this one doesn’t always — and the people interpreting it aren’t always helping.
The Court That Can’t Be Questioned
Here’s a thing that should genuinely disturb anyone who cares about democracy: in India, you can write an op-ed calling the Prime Minister corrupt. You can stand outside Parliament with a placard. You can file a PIL against a state government for anything from pollution to policy failure. But if you say, in public, that the Supreme Court has been falling short you could face criminal contempt proceedings.
Not theoretically. In 2020, senior advocate Prashant Bhushan was convicted of contempt of court for two tweets. One questioned the Chief Justice’s conduct during the pandemic. The other offered a critical view of four recent Chief Justices. He was fined one rupee. But a criminal conviction for a tweet about a public institution just shows how “supreme” the court actually is..
The Contempt of Courts Act, 1971 allows courts to punish speech that scandalises their authority. That phrase “scandalizes” is doing a lot of work. It’s vague enough to cover almost anything. And since the Supreme Court is simultaneously the institution being criticised and the institution deciding whether that criticism crosses a line, there is no check on how far it extends. No appeal. No external review. No independent body with the authority to say: this has gone too far.
The NCERT case made this even more explicit. The controversy centred on a section in the Class 8 textbook’s chapter titled “The Role of the Judiciary in Our Society,” which referred to challenges such as corruption in the judiciary, pendency of cases, and shortage of judges. That’s not a polemic. That’s a syllabus. And the Supreme Court treated it as a threat. Every other powerful institution in India is subject to scrutiny. Parliament answers to voters. Ministers answer to Parliament and to courts. But the Supreme Court which holds the final word on your rights, your liberty, the validity of every law in the land answers to no one. It has been almost eight decades since independence and not once has the process resulted in a judge actually being removed from office.That’s not judicial independence. That’s something closer to judicial impunity.
The Aravallis and What They Tell Us About Judicial Judgment
Sometimes a court’s failings show up not in how it handles power, but in how it handles knowledge.
In November 2025, the Supreme Court was asked to settle a long-running dispute about the definition of the Aravalli Hills. A two-billion-year-old mountain range stretching across Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, and Gujarat, which serves as a critical ecological buffer against desertification for the entire Indo-Gangetic plain. The court accepted a government-led committee’s definition of the Aravalli Hills as landforms with an elevation of at least 100 metres from the ground. Straightforward enough, until you understand what that definition actually means on the ground.
An internal assessment by the Forest Survey of India found that just 1,048 hills out of 12,081 in Rajasthan meet that 100-metre threshold. Which means roughly 11,000 hills which is an overwhelming majority of the ancient range would fall outside the definition and lose their legal protections, opening them up to mining, real-estate development, and corporate acquisition. The amicus curiae appointed by the court itself warned that accepting this definition would “totally endanger the environment and ecology of the mountains” and strip the range of its continuity and integrity. The court accepted the definition anyway
The ruling effectively undoes three decades of legal safeguards and removes protection from nearly 90 percent of the world’s oldest hills. The public backlash was swift enough that on December 29, a bench led by newly appointed Chief Justice Surya Kant decided to revisit the matter and stay the definition until a fair, impartial, independent expert opinion could be sought. Which is good. But it also raises the question: why did the court need a public firestorm to tell it something its own amicus had already put in writing?
So What Actually Changes?
The frustrating thing is that the solutions aren’t unknown. They’ve been sitting in Law Commission reports for decades, cited in speeches by retired judges at conferences where everyone nods and nothing happens.
Fill the vacancies. Create a transparent, time-bound appointment process. Expand fast-track courts aggressively. Replace the collegium with an appointments body that includes non-judicial voices. The UK, Canada, and South Africa all manage this without their judiciaries collapsing. Amend the Contempt of Courts Act to cover only demonstrably false, malicious statements, not honest criticism. Add a mandatory preliminary inquiry before arrest under provisions like 498A. And perhaps most urgently — stop treating public criticism of the court as an existential threat. A textbook that tells children courts have problems is not an attack. It’s civic education. The difference matters.
Why I’m Still Here
I want to end by being clear about something. I’m not writing this because I’ve decided the Indian judiciary is beyond saving. I’m writing it because I think it’s worth saving and because pretending the problems don’t exist is not the same as being optimistic.
This is the institution that delivered judgments on privacy, on environmental protection, on caste discrimination that genuinely changed lives. It has judges who are doing extraordinary work under conditions most people couldn’t imagine. That matters.
But good intentions inside a broken structure produce broken outcomes. And at some point, the people who care about the institution have to be the ones willing to say so.
That’s why I want to study law. Not to join a system and defend it as it is. But to understand it well enough to argue for what it should be.
