Indian Courts Data: Structure, Pendency and Statistics Till 2026

1.What Indian Courts Data Covers and Why It Matters

Indian courts data is, at its simplest, the running account of what the world's largest integrated court system holds, moves and decides. It answers five practical questions that every litigant, advocate, policymaker and researcher eventually asks: how many cases are pending, and where; how fast are they being decided; how many judges are actually available to decide them; what is being done about the backlog; and where can you verify any of these claims yourself. Until recently, most of this information lived in scattered annual reports and court publications. Today the bulk of it is published by the judiciary itself, in near real time, on the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) and through structured replies laid before Parliament by the Ministry of Law and Justice.

This article consolidates the verified numbers as they stood in 2025 and 2026. Every figure carries its as-of date, because pendency data moves every working day, and a number quoted without a date is a number quoted without meaning. Where this article's earlier version relied on dashboard-style visual estimates, each figure below has been rebuilt from primary sources: NJDG snapshots, Department of Justice statements placed before the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, Press Information Bureau releases and NALSA disposal reports.

Why does this matter to a practising advocate or a litigant? Because the data drives decisions. A company deciding whether to include an arbitration clause, a family weighing whether to settle at a Lok Adalat, a builder exposed to insolvency timelines, and a government deciding where to create new courts are all, in effect, consuming Indian courts data. Read correctly, the numbers tell you which forum is congested, which state's district judiciary is understaffed, and how long a realistic enforcement timeline looks. Read incorrectly, usually because of a missing as-of date or a confusion between sanctioned and working judge strength, they produce myths that this article dismantles in Section 15.

Three definitional points frame everything that follows. First, pendency means cases instituted and not yet disposed, including cases stayed, transferred or partly heard; it is not the same as cases being actively heard every day. Second, disposal includes every mode of ending a case on the court's file: judgment, dismissal, compromise, withdrawal or remand. Third, sanctioned strength is the number of posts the law permits, while working strength is the number of judges actually in office; the gap between the two is the vacancy, and most casual commentary about Indian courts data goes wrong by confusing them.

2.The Structure of the Indian Judiciary: One Integrated Hierarchy

India has a single, unified judiciary, not parallel federal and state court systems. The Constitution creates one hierarchy with three tiers, and every court in the country, however junior, exercises power that traces back to that single constitutional chain. This structure is the skeleton on which all Indian courts data hangs, because the National Judicial Data Grid and the Department of Justice both report statistics tier by tier, not state by state in the first instance.

2.1The Supreme Court of India

The Supreme Court is created by Article 124 of the Constitution as the apex court for the whole of India. Its original jurisdiction under Article 131 covers federal disputes; its appellate jurisdiction under Articles 132 to 136 brings judgments from the High Courts within its reach, with special leave petitions under Article 136 forming the largest single stream of its docket. Its advisory jurisdiction under Article 143 lets the President refer questions of law to it. The sanctioned strength of the Court is fixed not by the Constitution but by an Act of Parliament, the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Act, 1956, and stood at 34 judges including the Chief Justice of India until it was raised to 38 in August 2026, a change examined in Section 6.

2.2The 25 High Courts

Article 214 mandates a High Court for each State, and Parliament has created 25 of them. Several High Courts serve more than one State or Union Territory: the Bombay High Court for Maharashtra, Goa, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu; the Calcutta, Madras and Punjab and Haryana High Courts similarly cover territories beyond their home State; and the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh serves both Union Territories. High Courts are courts of appeal for the district judiciary within their territorial jurisdiction, and each High Court also superintends the subordinate courts in its territory under Article 227, which is why judicial vacancies in the district judiciary are filled by the High Court acting with the State Government under Articles 233 and 234.

2.3District and Subordinate Courts

The base of the pyramid is the district judiciary: district and sessions courts, civil courts of senior and junior division, family courts under the Family Courts Act, 1984, Motor Accident Claims Tribunals under the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, commercial courts, and the fast track special courts discussed in Section 10. According to the eCourts project's own reporting, roughly 18,735 district and taluka courts across about 3,452 court complexes have been computerised under the project. Judges of the district judiciary are appointed by the Governor in consultation with the High Court under Article 233, and the subordinate judicial service below them is governed by Article 234. The district judiciary is where the overwhelming majority of Indian litigants actually encounter a court, and, as Section 3 shows, it is also where the overwhelming majority of Indian pendency sits.

Sources: Department of Justice statements (as on 3 August 2026); Lok Sabha reply on pendency (as on 31 December 2025); eCourts Phase III project documentation.

2.4How a case travels up the hierarchy

The same integrated structure defines the appellate route that almost every contested case follows. Understanding it explains why the pendency tables in the next section look the way they do: the district judiciary receives the largest inflow of fresh cases, while each tier above it receives only a fraction of the tier below, filtered by leave, limitation and cost.

3.Pendency by Court Tier: The Verified Numbers

The single most quoted figure in any discussion of Indian courts data is total pendency. As on 31 December 2025, the Union Ministry of Law and Justice informed the Lok Sabha that more than 5.39 crore cases were pending across the Supreme Court, the High Courts and the district judiciary, drawing on the National Judicial Data Grid. By mid-2026 the running total had crossed 5.6 crore. To grasp the scale: if the pending cases of the district judiciary alone were a queue of people, it would be larger than the population of most countries on earth.

The distribution across tiers is what surprises most readers. The Supreme Court's 92,101 pending cases receive disproportionate public attention, but they represent well under one per cent of the national total. The district judiciary carries roughly 88 per cent of all pendency, which is why Indian courts data analysts watch district-level filing and disposal far more closely than Supreme Court admission lists.

Sources: Lok Sabha reply of the Ministry of Law and Justice (December 2025 figures); NJDG snapshots published by the Supreme Court and the eCommittee (April 2025 figures). The civil and criminal columns show the tier-wise split as on 30 April 2025, the last date for which a full published breakdown is available for all three tiers.

Two features of this table deserve attention. First, criminal cases dominate the district judiciary: 3.49 crore of 4.59 crore pending cases as on 30 April 2025 were criminal, a ratio of roughly three criminal cases to every civil case. Second, High Court pendency grew only about 4.75 per cent over the three years to December 2025, a far slower creep than the district judiciary's, indicating that the bottleneck at the intermediate tier is less about explosive inflow and more about slow disposal, a point developed in Section 9 using case clearance rates.

4.How Pendency Has Grown and How Old the Cases Are

Pendency is a stock, and it moves with two flows: fresh filings coming in and disposals going out. When filings exceed disposals over a sustained period, the stock rises. The district judiciary's stock has risen every single year since 2021, as the following figures placed before Parliament show.

Source: State-wise statement of pending cases in subordinate courts annexed to a Lok Sabha reply of the Ministry of Law and Justice, answered in August 2026, drawn from the National Judicial Data Grid.

The growth rate has moderated since the post-pandemic surge, but it has not reversed: in 2025 alone, the district judiciary added more than 14 lakh cases to its backlog. For the backlog to fall, disposals would need to exceed institutions, which last happened only in scattered quarters, not in any full recent year at the national level.

4.1The age of pending cases

Aggregate pendency understates the human problem, which is age. A recent NJDG snapshot of the district judiciary's age profile shows that roughly a third of pending cases are less than a year old, but a similar share has been pending between one and three years, and about one in ten has been pending for more than a decade.

Source: NJDG age-wise dashboard snapshot (2026). Figures are indicative and move daily; the NJDG reported that about 74.91 per cent of district court pendency was older than one year as on 30 April 2025.

5.Judge Strength and Vacancies: Sanctioned vs Working

The second pillar of Indian courts data is judicial manpower. The table below consolidates the official position as on 3 August 2026, from statements laid before Parliament. The pattern is consistent across all three tiers: a substantial gap between the posts the law provides and the judges actually sitting.

Source: Lok Sabha reply, Ministry of Law and Justice, as on 3 August 2026 (High Court figures per Department of Justice; district judiciary figures per Nyaya Vikas Portal 2.0).

Three observations follow. First, the Supreme Court is nearly full, and its sanctioned strength itself was raised by four posts through legislation in August 2026, so the apex court's constraint is docket volume, not bench strength. Second, High Courts are the worst-staffed tier relative to their sanctioned strength, running at roughly seven judges for every ten posts, and Section 7 shows the collegium pipeline explains much of that. Third, the district judiciary's sanctioned strength itself jumped from 25,900 at the end of 2025 to 30,868 by August 2026, as States created thousands of new posts; the vacancy figure therefore rose even though working strength also rose, and both facts must be read together.

5.1Judges per million population

The judge-population ratio is the most commonly misquoted statistic in this field, so it is worth setting out precisely. Calculated on the sanctioned strength of all three tiers and the 2011 Census population, the Union Government stated in Parliament that the ratio works out to approximately 21 to 22 judges per million population, a figure reaffirmed in replies in 2024 and again in January 2026. The Law Commission's 120th Report of 1987 had recommended raising this to 50 judges per million. However, calculated on working strength, the 2025 India Justice Report put the effective ratio at about 15 judges per million, noting that India had 21,285 judges for 1.4 billion people. The Law Commission's 245th Report (2014) added a methodological caution: it found the judge-population ratio an unscientific criterion, and preferred the rate-of-disposal method, which sizes the bench to the actual inflow and backlog of cases.

5.2Workload per judge

Ratios understate lived reality. The 2025 India Justice Report estimated the average district court workload at about 2,200 cases per judge, and in the Allahabad and Madhya Pradesh High Courts at roughly 15,000 cases per judge. At the High Court tier generally, India has approximately one High Court judge for every 18.7 lakh people. These are the numbers that determine how many minutes a bench can give a listed matter, and they explain why adjournment culture is often a rationing response to arithmetic rather than pure indifference.

6.The Supreme Court in Numbers

Calendar year 2025 was, statistically, the most demanding year in the Supreme Court's history, and the Court's own output set records to match. The Court saw three Chief Justices during the year, in Justices Sanjiv Khanna, B.R. Gavai and Surya Kant, and by the year's end its pending docket had risen to 92,101 cases, up 11.4 per cent from 82,674 at the end of 2023 and above the 82,496 recorded at the end of 2024.

Source: reporting of the Supreme Court's registry statistics for calendar 2025. For comparison, the United States Supreme Court hears argument in about 70-80 cases a year, and the United Kingdom Supreme Court received a little over 200 cases and delivered judgments in about 50 in the corresponding period.

The paradox of 2025, highlighted across commentary on the Court's data, is that record disposal coexisted with record pendency: the Court decided 87 per cent of what was filed, yet filings outpaced disposals because e-filing and virtual hearings have made access to the apex court materially easier. In July 2025 alone, over 7,500 matters were instituted and about 5,588 disposed, a monthly disposal rate of roughly 74 per cent, with 26,444 matters listed during that single month.

6.1The 2026 expansion to 38 judges

On 16 May 2026, the President promulgated the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Ordinance, 2026, raising the Court's sanctioned strength from 34 to 38 judges including the Chief Justice of India, after the then Chief Justice of India, Justice Surya Kant, wrote to the Union Government citing rising pendency and the demands of Constitution Benches. Parliament replaced the Ordinance with the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Act, 2026, passed by the Lok Sabha on 3 August and the Rajya Sabha on 5 August, and assented to by the President on 11 August 2026. The Act amends Section 2 of the 1956 Act, substituting 37 puisne judges for 33. It was the first expansion since 2019, when the strength went from 30 to 33 puisne judges. The escalation over the Court's life tells its own story of workload growth: 8 judges in 1950, 11 by the 1956 Act, 13 by 1960, 17 thereafter, 25 by 1986, 30 by 2009, 34 by 2019 and 38 now.

7.High Courts in Numbers

The 25 High Courts collectively form the tier where structural vacancy bites hardest. As on 3 August 2026, they had 1,122 sanctioned posts, 781 judges in office and 341 vacancies, a vacancy rate of about 30 per cent. The position had improved from July 2025, when the Government informed the Rajya Sabha that only 751 of 1,122 posts were filled and that High Court collegiums had not yet recommended names for 193 of the then 371 vacancies. In September 2025, only two High Courts, Sikkim and Meghalaya, were functioning at full sanctioned strength.

Source: Annexure to Lok Sabha reply, Ministry of Law and Justice, as on 3 August 2026. The Allahabad High Court has both the largest bench and, persistently, the largest vacancy count among High Courts.

Appointments to the High Courts are made by the President under Articles 217 and 224 of the Constitution through the collegium process, which the Government describes as a continuous, integrated and collaborative exercise between the executive and the judiciary involving consultations with constitutional authorities at both State and Central levels. Because recommendations must be initiated by the High Court collegium six months before a vacancy arises, vetted by the Supreme Court collegium and then processed by the Government, the pipeline has long lag openings created by retirements, elevations and resignations. As an interim measure, the Supreme Court permitted High Courts to appoint retired judges as ad hoc judges under Article 224A to deal with mounting arrears. Pending proposals between the Government and the collegium numbered in the hundreds through 2025, and Section 9 returns to what this means for disposal rates.

8.The District Judiciary in Numbers

The district judiciary is where Indian courts data matters most and changes fastest. As on 3 August 2026, sanctioned posts stood at 30,868, working strength at 23,558 and vacancies at 7,310, or 23.7 per cent of the sanctioned cadre, per the Nyaya Vikas Portal 2.0. A year earlier the picture looked different in both level and composition: as on 1 December 2025, the sanctioned cadre was 25,886 with 4,855 vacancies. The intervening jump of nearly 5,000 sanctioned posts reflects States creating new posts across the district judiciary in 2026, which mechanically widened the vacancy count until recruitment catches up.

Source: five-year statement annexed to a Lok Sabha reply of the Ministry of Law and Justice, answered in August 2026. Yearly figures are as on the stated dates of the respective government statements.

Recruitment at this tier is the joint responsibility of the High Courts and State Governments: in 16 States the recruitment is conducted through the State Public Service Commission, and in the remaining States by the High Courts themselves, under rules framed by the State in consultation with the High Court pursuant to Articles 233 and 234. The Supreme Court in Malik Mazhar Sultan (2007) prescribed timelines for recruitment cycles, and the Court continues to monitor compliance in a dedicated case. State-wise, the largest absolute vacancies in August 2026 were in Karnataka (1,640 posts, following a large cadre expansion), Uttar Pradesh (1,082), Maharashtra (897), Gujarat (535) and Bihar (374).

9.What the Data Says About Delay

Is the system getting slower? The honest answer from the data is that it is running harder, not necessarily faster. Case clearance rates, which compare disposals with institutions over a period, stood at about 94 per cent for High Courts and 96 per cent for district courts in 2024: in other words, courts were disposing of nearly, but not quite, as many cases as were being filed. A clearance rate sustained below 100 per cent guarantees a growing backlog even with heroic disposal effort, which is exactly the pattern in Section 4's table. Average pendency tells the same story from the litigant's side: estimated average durations of roughly 3.2 years in district courts (2020 assessment) and 5.5 years in High Courts (2022 assessment), with wide variation by State.

The composition of the docket explains much of the delay. Land and property disputes account for the largest single block of pending cases, roughly a fifth of the total and about two-thirds of all pending civil cases, and a quarter of the cases decided by the Supreme Court have historically involved land disputes. The Government itself is the largest single litigant, being responsible for roughly half of the pending caseload across courts. Both facts push in the same direction: the types of disputes that congest Indian courts are precisely those least amenable to quick adversarial resolution without procedural reform, better records and earlier settlement.

10.Fast Track Special Courts and Specialised Forums

Indian courts data also tracks the specialised courts created to prioritise sensitive categories. The flagship is the Centrally Sponsored Scheme of Fast Track Special Courts (FTSCs), launched in October 2019 after the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2018, to expedite trials of rape cases and offences under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012. The scheme, funded from the Nirbhaya Fund, was extended to 31 March 2026 and then temporarily to 30 September 2026. As on 30 April 2026, 775 FTSCs, including 398 exclusive POCSO courts, were functional across 29 States and Union Territories; by 30 June 2026, 779 were functional and the scheme had cumulatively disposed of 3,96,940 cases since inception.

Source: Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha replies of the Ministry of Law and Justice (2026), based on information furnished by the High Courts. Uttar Pradesh operates the largest FTSC network (218 courts), followed by Madhya Pradesh (67), Kerala (55), Bihar (54) and Rajasthan (45).

The 2025 figures show the strain of a widening mandate: registrations nearly doubled while disposals fell, pushing pending rape and POCSO cases past 2.45 lakh. A NITI Aayog impact evaluation nevertheless found the scheme effective in achieving expeditious disposal and a supportive environment for victims. The wider lesson for Indian courts data is that specialised courts raise throughput only while their intake stays matched to their strength. The same logic governs family courts under the Family Courts Act, 1984, commercial courts under the Commercial Courts Act, 2015, and Motor Accident Claims Tribunals under the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, all of which sit within the district judiciary for reporting purposes.

11.The eCourts Project: Phase I to Phase III

The technology backbone behind modern Indian courts data is the eCourts Mission Mode Project, under implementation since 2007 as part of the National eGovernance Plan, with the Supreme Court's eCommittee providing policy direction and the Department of Justice providing funding. Its phases map the digitisation of the judiciary better than any narrative can.

Sources: PIB release of 13 September 2023 on the Cabinet approval of Phase III; eCourts Phase III Detailed Project Report; Ministry reporting to Parliament.

Phase III's stated ambition is a regime of digital, online and paperless courts, with a unified technology platform giving judges, registries, lawyers and litigants a single interface. The usage statistics already show the shift. As of 30 September 2025, video-conferencing facilities were available in 3,240 courtrooms and 1,272 jails, and more than 3.81 crore online hearings had been conducted since the pandemic normalised them. Twenty-nine virtual courts for traffic and petty challans had between them received 8.96 crore challans and disposed of 7.84 crore, with 86.59 lakh challans paid online, realising Rs 895.59 crore. The eCourts mobile app, which gives litigants case status, cause lists, orders and judgments on a phone, had crossed 3.38 crore downloads. For a practitioner, the practical effect is that the average case's paper trail, from filing to certified copy, can now be managed without a single physical visit to the court complex.

12.The NJDG: How to Read Indian Courts Data Yourself

The National Judicial Data Grid is the single most important instrument in this field, and using it correctly is a skill worth acquiring. The NJDG was opened for public access for district courts on 19 September 2015, extended to the High Courts on 3 July 2020, and to the Supreme Court on 14 September 2023. It now aggregates case data from more than 18,000 courts, updated daily through the Case Information System, and is the repository of over 23 crore cases, which makes it the largest judicial database in the world.

The grid's structure mirrors the judiciary: separate dashboards for district courts, High Courts and the Supreme Court, each with an at-a-glance view, a pending dashboard and a disposal dashboard. Within each, you can cut the data by State, district, court complex, case type, age band and year of institution, and for the district judiciary you can drill down to lists of cases pending for more than 10, 20 or 30 years, cases stayed by higher courts, and appeals pending beyond five years. The Supreme Court's Justice Clock publishes the same running totals from the Court's own registry.

13.Lok Adalats and ADR in Numbers

Any honest account of Indian courts data must include the parallel disposal machinery: Lok Adalats under the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987, permanent Lok Adalats, mediation and arbitration. The scale is extraordinary. NALSA, headed by the Chief Justice of India as Patron-in-Chief, convenes National Lok Adalats roughly quarterly, and each edition takes up both pending court cases and pre-litigation disputes. In 2025, four National Lok Adalats disposed of a combined total of more than 14 crore cases and pre-litigation matters.

Sources: NALSA National Lok Adalat disposal reports (final figures where published, preliminary where marked). Settlement value is the aggregate amount awarded or agreed across pre-litigation and pending matters.

Two cautions keep these numbers honest. First, the bulk of Lok Adalat disposals are pre-litigation matters, utility disputes, cheque and traffic matters, minor claims, that never enter a court file, so a 4-crore disposal does not reduce the 5.39 crore court pendency by anything like the same amount. Second, settlement value measures the amount agreed, not money actually recovered. Even with those cautions, the mechanism resolves in a single day a volume of disputes that the courts could not process in months, and the Mediation Act, 2023 has since given institutional mediation a statutory framework alongside it.

14.Why the Backlog Persists: A Practitioner's Reading

Numbers describe the backlog; they do not explain it. From the desk of a practising advocate, five structural causes recur. First, inflow: filings have grown with population, commercial activity, digitised access and new penal and commercial statutes, while bench strength has grown more slowly. A system disposing 96 per cent of what it receives still accumulates backlog, as Section 9 showed. Second, vacancies: roughly a quarter of the district judiciary's sanctioned posts and about 30 per cent of High Court posts were unfilled in 2026, and each unfilled post represents thousands of hearing hours lost annually. Third, adjournments and process: service of summons, witness attendance and interlocutory battles stretch trials; the digitisation of service and evidence under Phase III targets exactly these chokepoints. Fourth, the State as litigant: with government involved in about half of pending cases, delays in decisions to settle or to not appeal propagate system-wide. Fifth, docket composition: land and property disputes, two-thirds of civil pendency, depend on century-old records, fragmented titles and revenue administration that no court process alone can fix.

The corollary is that the fixes being tried are matched to causes: cadre expansion and accelerated recruitment for vacancies; FTSCs and specialised benches for prioritised categories; e-filing, virtual hearings and digital records for process delay; Lok Adalats, mediation and ODR for volume; and record digitisation for land-heavy litigation. Indian courts data is how we know whether each lever is working, which is why the NJDG, Parliament replies and NALSA reports cited throughout this article matter beyond their numbers.

15.Myths vs Facts About Indian Courts Data

17.Frequently Asked Questions