More than 40 million cases pending in lower courts: Govt tells Parliament

Addressing the issue of increasing the retirement age of judges in the apex and high courts, the Union Minister for Law and Justice said that there is no proposal to do so currently

Answering the question on the number of vacancies in the Indian judicial system, the Union Minister for Law and Justice Kiren Rijiju told the Rajya Sabha that 72,062 cases are pending in the Supreme Court, 59,45,709 cases in High Courts and 4,19,79,353 cases pending in the district and subordinate courts till July 1, 2022

Pending cases as of July 1, 2022

Serial No	Name of Courts	Pending Cases
1.	Supreme Court	72,062
2.	High Courts	59,45,709
3.	District and subordinate courts	4,19,79,353

Source: Supreme Court of India website and National Judicial Data Grid(NJDG)

 

The minister said the disposal of cases is the domain of the judiciary, and the government has no direct role in it. “No time frame has been fixed for disposal of cases. It(disposal) depends on several factors,” the minister said.

Also Read | 50 mn cases pending in Indian courts, to go up if no action taken: Rijiju

Addressing the issue of increasing the retirement age of judges in the apex and high courts, the minister said that there is no proposal to do so currently. “The Constitution(114th Amendment) Bill was introduced in 2010 to increase the retirement age of High Court judges to 65 years, but it was not taken up in the Parliament and lapsed with the dissolution of the 15th Lok Sabha,” he said.

Earlier, the Attorney General for India, KK Venugopal, had also stressed the need to increase the retirement age of Supreme Court and High Court judges.

Talking about schemes for the judiciary, the minister said Rs 692.14 crore was spent on the centrally sponsored scheme for developing infrastructure facilities for the judiciary, including the scheme of operationalisation of Gram Nyayalayas for the year 2021-2022. Similarly, Rs 98.30 crore was spent on the eCourts project and Rs 39.96 crore on Access to Justice/DISHA in 2021-2022.

However, the spending on research for justice delivery and legal reforms remained low, with only Rs 1.06 spent on it in 2020-2021, according to the data released by the minister. In 2021-2022, the total spending on legal schemes was Rs 17.5 crore more than in 2020-2021.
 

Expenditure on Department scheme in last five years

Scheme	2017-18	2018-19	2019-20	2020-21	2021-22
Centrally sponsored scheme for the development of infrastructure facilities for judiciary including scheme for operationalisation of Gram Nyayalayas	629.21	658.00	990.00	599.00	692.14
e-Courts	374.11	282.76	179.26	179.31	98.30
Access to justice/DISHA	5.73	15.46	28.67	33.53	39.96
Action research for justice delivery and legal reforms	1.26	1.54	1.25	1.06	*

*The scheme ceased to be a scheme component

“We need to spend more on judicial infrastructure. There have been cases reported where trial courts do not have staff or even the stationery for the courts to function. In the Supreme Court and High Courts, there are certainly resources to assist judges to research on judicial matters but the same cannot be said for trial court judges,” Bharat Chugh, former judge and an advocate in the Supreme Court, said.