An unflinching indictment of India's most broken institution — and the man supposed to fix it
The Illusion of Justice
India calls itself the world's largest democracy. It boasts a Constitution that is among the most elaborate and rights-protective documents ever written. It has a Supreme Court that occasionally delivers judgments of genuine courage and constitutional brilliance. And yet, for the ordinary Indian — the farmer in Vidarbha, the daily wage worker in Patna, the sexual assault survivor in Unnao, the small businessman cheated in Surat — the justice system is not a shield. It is a weapon used against them.
The trial courts and lower courts of India — the District Courts, the Sessions Courts, the Civil Courts, the Magistrate Courts — are where 99% of all legal battles are actually fought. These are the courts that decide your bail application, your divorce case, your property dispute, your criminal trial. These are the courts that determine whether an innocent man goes to prison or walks free. These are the courts that, in theory, are the first and most accessible face of justice in a democratic republic.
In practice, they are cesspools of corruption, casteism, nepotism, incompetence, and institutional rot so deep that no amount of reform-speak from air-conditioned courtrooms in New Delhi can cure it. And at the very top of this crumbling edifice sits Chief Justice of India Surya Kant — a man who, by all available evidence, is more interested in making headlines about judicial propriety than actually cleaning the Augean stables that are India's lower courts.
Let's call it what it is. India's trial court system is broken beyond cosmetic repair. And nobody in power has the spine to admit it.
The Scale of the Catastrophe
Let's start with numbers, because numbers don't lie even when judges do.
As of 2026, there are over 5 crore (50 million) cases pending across India's courts. Yes, you read that right. Five crore cases. Of these, the overwhelming majority — more than 4.4 crore — are pending in the district and subordinate courts. The Supreme Court's much-publicized backlog of 90,000+ cases is practically a rounding error compared to the tsunami of unresolved justice drowning ordinary Indians at the grassroots level.
What does this mean in real terms? It means that a property dispute filed today in a District Court in Uttar Pradesh may not see a final judgment for 20 to 30 years. It means that an undertrial prisoner — who has not been convicted of anything — may spend 5, 7, even 10 years in jail simply waiting for their trial to begin. It means that justice, for most Indians, is not delayed. It is effectively dead on arrival.
The National Crime Records Bureau consistently reports that over 75% of India's prison population consists of undertrials — people who have not been found guilty. Let that sink in. Three out of every four people in Indian prisons have not been convicted. They are there because the system is too broken, too slow, and too corrupt to process their cases in any reasonable timeframe. This is not a statistic. This is a national scandal of historic proportions.
The Money That Buys Justice
Walk into any District Court in India and within five minutes, if you know where to look, you will see the economy of corruption operating in plain sight.
There is a well-established, thoroughly documented, and entirely open secret in the Indian legal system: in many lower courts, justice is not administered — it is auctioned. The price varies by state, by court, by judge, by the nature of the case. But the principle is consistent. If you pay, the wheels turn faster. If you don't, your file gathers dust in a pile that would make an archaeologist weep.
The Transparency International India report has consistently ranked India's judiciary among the country's most corrupt institutions. A 2020 survey by Daksh India found that a significant percentage of litigants reported paying unofficial fees to get basic court work done — not to win their case, mind you, but simply to have their case heard. To get their file moved. To ensure a date is given. The corruption at the lower court level is not grand and theatrical — it is mundane, transactional, and absolutely normalized.
Court clerks are bribed to list cases. Peons are bribed to deliver notices. In some places, even access to a judge's chamber requires a payment that never appears in any receipt book. The formal economy of court fees and legal charges sits atop an informal economy of survival-level corruption that lubricates the entire machinery.
And what happens to those who cannot pay? They wait. They suffer. They sometimes die before their case concludes. Justice, in India's lower courts, is a luxury product sold at a price most Indians cannot afford.
The Judge as Feudal Lord
The abuse of judicial power in India's subordinate courts is something that legal academics mention in hushed tones, that lawyers know in their bones, and that ordinary litigants experience as a kind of humiliation they have no language for.
In the lower court system, a judge is — functionally, practically, and experientially — a feudal lord. They can adjourn your case without reason, on any pretext, for any period of time. They can summon witnesses capriciously. They can pass interim orders that ruin businesses and destroy lives, and these orders may remain in place for years before any appellate court gets around to looking at them. They can be openly rude, dismissive, and contemptuous toward litigants — particularly those who are poor, unrepresented, or from marginalized communities.
The contempt of court law in India is a magnificent instrument for silencing anyone who dares to criticize this behavior. A judge who abuses their power is protected by the same law that was supposedly designed to protect the dignity of justice. The result is a system where accountability flows only upward — litigants and lawyers are held in contempt for questioning judges, while judges face no meaningful accountability for their conduct whatsoever.
Reports of judges routinely showing up late, leaving early, taking extended recesses, and disposing of hundreds of cases a day by simply typing "next date" are not conspiracy theories. They are documented realities recorded by court observers, legal aid organizations, and even parliamentary committees. A study by DAKSH, a governance think tank, found that judges in some district courts were spending less than two to three minutes per case — not to decide them, mind you, but merely to assign the next hearing date.
This is not justice. This is theater. Expensive, exhausting, soul-destroying theater.
The Caste Elephant in the Courtroom
India's judiciary is among the most caste-homogeneous elite institutions in the country. While the political class has — imperfectly and incompletely — opened itself to Dalit, Adivasi, OBC, and minority representation through reservations and democratic pressure, the judiciary has remained a fortress of upper-caste dominance protected by the legitimizing language of "merit."
The numbers are stark and they are damning.
An analysis of Supreme Court judges since independence shows that the overwhelming majority have come from upper-caste Hindu backgrounds — predominantly Brahmins, Kayasthas, and other "savarna" communities. Dalits, who constitute roughly 16% of India's population, have had exactly two Chief Justices in over 75 years — Justice K.G. Balakrishnan and Justice B.R. Gavai. OBCs, who constitute anywhere between 40-52% of the population depending on the estimate used, have been egregiously underrepresented at every level of the judicial hierarchy.
In the Rajya Sabha on 25 July 2024, the government was forced to admit that of 661 High Court judges appointed since 2018, 499 were from the general category, 78 from OBC communities, just 21 from SC communities, and only 12 from ST communities. A bench that is supposed to deliver justice to a country of 1.4 billion people — the majority of them Dalit, Adivasi, or OBC — looks nothing like the people it judges.
In the lower courts, the picture is even more complex and troubling. In many states, judicial appointments at the district level are influenced by bar associations that themselves operate along caste lines. The informal patronage networks that determine who gets elevated, who gets transferred to a "good posting," and whose conduct complaints are swept under the carpet — all of these operate within a caste framework that nobody wants to name out loud.
The collegium system — that extraordinary constitutional improvisation by which judges appoint judges — has proven to be the most effective mechanism for elite reproduction in Indian institutional history. It is a system designed, consciously or not, to perpetuate the sociodemographic profile of the judiciary by insulating the appointment process from any democratic accountability. In practice, this means that a certain kind of person — almost always male, almost always upper-caste, almost always from a family with a legal background — continues to populate the benches of India's courts from the district level all the way up to the Supreme Court.
The judiciary speaks constantly about meritocracy. But merit, in a country where Dalit children are denied access to education, where OBC students face systematic discrimination, where access to the legal profession itself is filtered through socioeconomic privilege, is not a neutral concept. It is a code word for the reproduction of existing hierarchies under a respectable label.
The Family Business of Law
Here is something that Indians in the legal profession know very well but rarely say in print: the higher judiciary of India is, to a significant degree, a family business.
The collegium system — by which sitting Supreme Court judges recommend the appointment of new judges without any external oversight — has created conditions in which the sons, daughters, sons-in-law, and daughters-in-law of sitting and former judges have a dramatically elevated chance of making it to the bench. This is not always a formal, explicit arrangement. It operates through recommendation, reputation, and the warm glow of institutional familiarity.
When a former High Court judge's child practices before the same court where their parent once sat, they carry with them an invisible currency of credibility that no amount of formal meritocracy can neutralize. When the collegium evaluates a candidate and finds that their name is familiar — because their father was a judge, their uncle was an Advocate General, their family has been in law for three generations — that familiarity counts for something. It should not. But it does.
This dynastic tendency in the judiciary is not a minor inconvenience. It is a structural corruption of the institution's legitimacy. A court that cannot be seen to be independent of the social networks that produced its members cannot claim to be a court of justice for everyone. It is, at best, a court of justice for its own kind.
The CJI Who Talks While Courts Burn
And now we arrive at the man at the top. Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, the 53rd occupant of that office, who took his oath in November 2025 and has approximately 10 months left to leave his mark on Indian legal history.
Let us be honest about what has happened in those months.
The Supreme Court's docket crossed 90,000 cases when CJI Surya Kant took charge — a number that had grown by nearly 10,000 in a single year. Lower court pendency continues to sit at the catastrophic 4.4 crore mark. The collegium has been slow in filling vacancies across High Courts, with several courts operating at dangerously low judicial strength. CJI Surya Kant himself was reported as having failed to fill even the single Supreme Court vacancy that was pending when he took charge, while the vacancy count threatened to rise to four with the retirements of Justice Rajesh Bindal, Justice Pankaj Mithal, and Justice J.K. Maheshwari in the first half of 2026.
What has the CJI been focused on? One of his more notable moments in public life during this period was his intervention in the Ranveer Allahabadia controversy — the comedian who made an ill-advised joke on a YouTube show. The Supreme Court under CJI Surya Kant chose to wade into the morality of a comedian's poorly-judged humor, with the CJI declaring he knew how to "deal with youngsters who think we are outdated" and questioning whether free speech exists as a "fundamental right on a platter."
This is a telling moment. Forty-four lakh cases are pending in the lower courts. Lakhs of undertrial prisoners rot in jails. Women who filed rape complaints years ago are still waiting for trial to begin. Farmers who filed land acquisition disputes a decade ago have buried two generations of family members without resolution. And the Chief Justice of India found it important to weigh in personally on what a comedian said on a podcast.
The Supreme Court under various recent CJIs has developed an addiction to high-profile, media-friendly matters — electoral bonds, hate speech, celebrity controversies — while the foundational crisis of judicial accessibility and lower court functioning festers without any serious institutional attention. CJI Surya Kant promised to prioritize pendency and mediation. The evidence of the first 100 days suggests that promises are easier to make at oath-taking ceremonies than they are to keep in the grinding reality of institutional reform.
The Constitution Benches that were supposed to clear critical legal questions holding up lower court decision-making have not moved with the urgency that a 4.4 crore case backlog demands. Oral mentioning was theatrically restricted — a gesture that plays well in press releases but does nothing for the litigant in Barabanki whose case has been pending for 18 years.
The Contempt Weapon: Silence by Law
One of the most toxic aspects of India's judicial culture is the weaponization of contempt of court to silence legitimate criticism. The Contempt of Courts Act, 1971 gives courts the power to punish anyone who "scandalizes or tends to scandalize" the judiciary. This provision — vague, sweeping, and ripe for abuse — has been used to threaten lawyers, journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens who dare to publicly criticize judicial conduct.
In a functional democracy, public institutions are subject to public scrutiny. Politicians face elections. Bureaucrats face audit. But judges in India face no meaningful external accountability mechanism — and they have at their disposal a legal weapon to suppress criticism of their conduct. This is an institutional arrangement that would be considered extraordinary in any mature democracy, and it is one that has calcified the culture of unaccountability that defines the lower court system.
Lawyers who practice in district courts across India will tell you — off the record, always off the record — stories of judges who took umbrage at a legal argument, who punished a lawyer by systematically adjourning their other cases, who used their power over court scheduling as a personal weapon against those who displeased them. These stories are not rare. They are routine. And they go largely unreported because the price of reporting them is too high.
Infrastructure: The Physical Collapse
The crisis of India's lower courts is not only institutional — it is physical. Walk into a district court building in most Indian cities and you will find infrastructure that ranges from the merely inadequate to the genuinely scandalous.
Courtrooms are overcrowded, poorly ventilated, and sometimes structurally unsafe. Record rooms — where case files that represent years of litigation are stored — are chaotic, damp, and infested with vermin. It is not unheard of for crucial case documents to be "lost" — a development that mysteriously tends to favor certain parties and that nobody is ever held accountable for. The digitization initiative that was supposed to drag India's courts into the 21st century has proceeded at a pace that suggests the 21st century is expected to arrive sometime around the 23rd.
Court staff — typists, stenographers, peons, process servers — are chronically underpaid and operate within a culture where supplementing official salaries through unofficial collections is an institutional norm rather than an individual failing. This is a system that has effectively created structural corruption by design: underpay the people who run the machinery, then act shocked when they demand money to operate it.
The Undertrial Catastrophe: Mass Incarceration Without Conviction
Perhaps the single most devastating indictment of India's lower court system is what it has done to the country's undertrial population.
As established earlier, more than 75% of India's prison population — hundreds of thousands of human beings — are undertrials. They have not been convicted. In the eyes of the law, they are innocent. But they are in prison because they cannot afford bail, because their trial cannot proceed, because the system processes cases at a pace that makes geological time look rushed.
The Ministry of Home Affairs told Parliament in April 2022 that 7,128 undertrial prisoners had already spent more than five years in jail as of 31 December 2020 — and had still not been convicted of anything. That is not delay. That is incarceration as institutional drift. That is the state using its own administrative failure as a sentencing mechanism.
The Supreme Court has periodically expressed concern about this. Guidelines have been issued. Directions have been passed. And the undertrial population continues to grow.
This is not a problem that speeches and circulars can solve. It requires a fundamental transformation of how district courts operate — their staffing, their infrastructure, their culture, their accountability mechanisms. It requires the kind of sustained, unglamorous, politically difficult institutional reform that is not amenable to the kind of high-profile pronouncements that CJIs tend to prefer.
The victims of this system are not, for the most part, the educated middle class who can post bail and hire lawyers and navigate the system's Byzantine complexity. They are the poor, the illiterate, the socially marginalized — Dalits, Adivasis, minorities, migrant workers, people who do not know their rights and have no one to help them exercise the rights they do know.
For them, the Constitution of India is a document that exists in a building they have never entered, written in a language they do not speak, promising rights that they will never access.
The Reform That Never Comes
Every few years, there is a burst of judicial reform enthusiasm. Committees are formed. Reports are written. Recommendations are made. And then nothing happens.
The Law Commission of India has produced hundreds of reports on judicial reform over the decades. They sit in government archives, gathering the same dust as the case files they were meant to help clear. The All India Judges' Association has repeatedly raised the crisis of judicial vacancies and infrastructure deficit. Recommendations to increase the judge-to-population ratio — which in India stands at a scandalous 21 judges per million people against a globally recommended norm of 50 — have been made, noted, and ignored across multiple governments of multiple political stripes.
The problem is not lack of knowledge. Everyone knows what is wrong. The problem is lack of political will and institutional incentive to actually fix it. The current system, for all its dysfunction, serves powerful interests very well. Delayed justice is a tool of oppression. Those with money, connections, and the ability to sustain prolonged litigation use the system's slowness as a weapon against those who cannot. Courts are not merely failing to deliver justice — in many cases, their very dysfunction is being weaponized.
A Final Reckoning
India's lower court system is not in crisis. The word "crisis" implies a temporary deviation from a norm. What exists in India's trial courts is the norm itself — a permanent, self-reproducing, institutionally protected catastrophe that grinds ordinary lives to dust while those responsible for fixing it hold press conferences about judicial independence and the sanctity of the law.
Chief Justice Surya Kant has under 10 months. History will not judge him by his speeches. It will judge him by what happens to those 4.4 crore cases. It will judge him by how many undertrial prisoners sleep in jail cells tonight who shouldn't be there. It will judge him by whether the collegium begins to reflect the demographic reality of a country where Dalits, Adivasis, and OBCs constitute the majority of the population.
The judiciary of India is deeply, structurally, culturally, and institutionally broken. It is casteist in its composition. It is nepotistic in its appointments. It is corrupt at its foundation. It is indifferent to the suffering of the poor. And it is protected from accountability by a contempt law that makes honest criticism a legal hazard.
Somewhere in India tonight, a man who has spent six years in jail waiting for his trial to begin is asking his cell-mate when he might get out. Somewhere, a woman who filed a domestic violence complaint three years ago is wondering when her case will come up for hearing. Somewhere, a small businessman is watching his life's work dissolve because a property injunction that should have lasted six months has now been in place for four years.
For them, the Preamble of the Constitution — with its solemn promise of Justice, social, economic and political — is not an aspiration. It is a cruel joke. And the people who should be delivering on that promise are too busy managing their dockets, protecting their collegium, and presiding over a system that has perfected the art of looking like justice while delivering none of it.
The temple of justice in India has long since become a marketplace. And nobody — not the CJI, not the government, not the bar councils, not the legal academy — has the courage to say it plainly.
Until now.
This article represents an editorial opinion and critical commentary on India's judiciary as a public institution. All referenced statistics are drawn from publicly available government data, legal think-tank reports, and parliamentary records.