At least 510 million cases are awaiting judgments in various courts across the country, according to the National Judicial Data Grid numbers. The Supreme Court would need nearly 20 months to dispose of all the pending cases if no new lawsuit is filed in this period, while it would take almost two years for the subordinate courts to clear the backlog, and high courts would need at least three years to get rid of the due cases, shows a Moneycontrol analysis of the data.

The prime minister on August 31 called for swift justice in cases involving crime against women at the National Conference of District Judiciary, but data suggests that there might be a need to overhaul the entire process, given the huge load of cases yet to get their verdicts.

If new cases are taken into consideration, none of the courts would be able to clear their docks ever at the current pace of resolution.

Over the past six years, the institution of cases has outpaced the disposal at the Supreme Court. While 283,090 cases were added to the docket, 3.5 percent less or 273,574 could be disposed.

Just last month, the high courts could clear only 8 percent fewer cases than were introduced. The disposal rate was even lower at 51 percent for lower judiciary. Nearly 2 million cases were filed with the districts and subordinate courts in August, but only 1.23 million could be decided.

It is not a surprise then that 160 million more cases have been added since 2011, and out of this, more than half, or 81 million, were added in the last five years alone. While the courts were adding 2.8 percent more cases to the docket each year until 2020, the additions almost doubled to 4.4 percent per annum between 2020 and 2024.

The number of cases before the apex court shot up 6.3 percent between 2020 and 2024, compared with 1.6 percent addition per annum in the decade till 2019.

The high courts were the only ones to witness a lower growth of pending cases during this period. But their track record in resolving pendency of long-standing disputes has worsened.

Analysis shows that while the Supreme Court’s track record in clearing cases pending for over a decade did not change between 2019 and 2024, that for the high courts and lower judiciary only worsened.

In the case of high courts, over a fifth of cases (22.5 percent) have been pending for over a decade, compared with 17.7 percent a decade ago. In the case of lower courts, the ratio of cases pending for over a decade to total ongoing matters went up to nearly a tenth from 7.8 percent in 2019.