Societies in search of a quick fix often look for a scapegoat. In today’s India, for much of the ruling class, it is the courts which don the role. Public policy advisers are quick to paint the judiciary as obstructionist and somehow responsible for stalling India’s otherwise grandiose plans for economic prosperity.
Not for the first time, Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, pointed to the courts as the chief roadblock to the country’s development. “We effectively have somewhere between 20-25 years to become Viksit Bharat,” he said. “The judicial system and the legal ecosystem, but the judicial system in particular, is now, in my view, the single biggest hurdle to [India] becoming Viksit Bharat and growing rapidly.”
Misinformed, vague censure is no solution
Leaving aside what Viksit Bharat might, in fact, mean, these comments once again reduce the judiciary to a caricature. Mr. Sanyal’s speech, delivered at the Nyaya Nirman conference last month, recycles familiar tropes about judges working short hours and going on vacations. Mr. Sanyal, perhaps justifiably, claims that we must stop being self-congratulatory when it comes to analysing the workings of our legal processes. But the solution is not misinformed or vague and hazy censure.
India’s judicial system is far from perfect. But to brand its imperfections as the “single biggest hurdle” to growth distorts its place in India’s democracy. What is true is that our courts are overstretched and under-resourced, but other wings of government scarcely consider these to be issues of priority. In reality, the courts only mirror the failures that mire the rest of India’s governance.
Mr. Sanyal’s own example undercuts his case. He cites the enforcement of Section 12A of the Commercial Courts Act, 2015, which makes pre-suit mediation mandatory. He says that in Mumbai, most of such mediations fail, demonstrating that the courts are imposing an ineffective procedure. But what this ignores is that it is not our courts that dreamt up Section 12A. Parliament wrote it into law. Judges are bound to enforce what legislators enact. If a provision is poorly designed, the failure lies with the drafters, not with those applying it.
Mr. Sanyal also invokes what he calls the “99-to-1 problem”. In his telling, most of India’s rules and regulations are drafted to guard against the abuse of laws by a small fraction of people — exceptions, which he argues, should be left to the courts to resolve. “Because I do not think it will get sorted out there, the rest of the 99% of laws and rules end up being complicated to address that 1%, feeding back into a spiral,” he says. The precise meaning of this formulation is difficult to pin down, but what it points to, once again, is less a judicial failing and more a familiar malaise of Indian law-making — that is, imprecision in drafting.
He further suggests that this 99-to-1 problem manifests in the court’s inability to enforce contracts efficiently. But this too is a superficial critique which ignores how the country’s largest contractors, the Union and State governments, behave. Tender documents are riddled with arbitrary conditions, routine processes are overlooked, and legal rights are treated as discretionary favours. It is easy to speak about judicial delays without emphasising on the role played in it by India’s biggest litigant — the government.
Tax authorities file appeals against routine orders as a matter of course, often dragging disputes all the way up to the Supreme Court of India. Ministries fight over simple contractual matters that they ought to honour. Public enterprises sue with little thought, squandering judicial resources. Citizens, pensioners, teachers, public service employees and doctors serving the state are forced to litigate for simple benefits that they are entitled to in the ordinary course. If efficiency is our concern, then we must ask ourselves why successive governments — both at the level of the Union and the States — have been unwilling to discipline their own litigation practices.
The system, the reality
Another easy target is court sittings. The visible part of the job might run only from 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the case of the Supreme Court and a little longer in the case of the High Courts. But judges may hear anywhere between 50 to 100 cases during this window. It is a difficult job to do well.
Behind those hearings lie hours of preparation: reading briefs, drafting and signing orders, and considering precedents. Much of judicial work requires cerebral thought and happens behind closed doors, in the early hours of the morning or late into night and certainly across weekends.
Vacations too are misunderstood. Their colonial origins make them an easy target. But courts have benches sitting through vacations too, and the holidays that other judges get is meant for a little relaxation but for the most part to complete their reserved judgments. India’s judges are already working against improbable odds. They face one of the heaviest caseloads in the world, a fact that is only compounded by continuing vacancies. To deny them structured breaks would only undermine the cause of justice.
What Mr. Sanyal’s lament also ignores is that much of the judiciary’s burden comes from laws that are misconceived, vague, and designed for optics rather than clarity. The government’s much vaunted criminal law reforms went little further than changing the names of India’s age-old criminal legislation. For the most part, they recycle the colonial framework, if merely converting what were codes into sanhitas, leaving judges and lawyers grappling with decades of precedent with newly rebranded sections.
The new Income-Tax Act, which will come into force next year, is another case in point. Its enactment has been touted as an effort at simplification. But a reading of its provisions suggests that it is old wine in a new bottle. Explanations, exceptions and provisos have been removed and inserted as new sections, only likely leading to a new wave of litigation.
The word “notwithstanding” used in many places in the existing income-tax law has been replaced with the word “irrespective”. The first word has deep legal roots. There is a mountain of case law on how phrases such as “notwithstanding anything contained in any other statute” should be interpreted. In theory, the word “irrespective” is meant to serve as a simpler substitute. But how exactly does this change make the law any clearer for the everyday taxpayer? If anything, it swaps one piece of legal jargon for another. For the ordinary taxpayer, the law is, at best, differently obscure.
None of this is to deny that the judiciary needs reform. Delays are real, infrastructure is outdated, and accountability mechanisms are weak. But lampooning the system as the “biggest hurdle” to our development only clouds the debate.
Most acute in the lower judiciary
It is no doubt politically convenient to cast the judiciary as the culprit. Doing so allows governments to deflect their own failures — both administrative and legislative. But our disputes drag on for the most part, not because judges are out vacationing, but because our laws are poorly framed, governments have an endless appetite for litigation, and dockets remain overloaded even as vacancies persist. These pressures are felt most acutely in the district courts, where most Indians encounter the justice system.
India’s constitutional democracy is not designed for speed alone. Courts were never meant to be rubber stamps for governance but independent checks on executive power. To weaken them is to chip away at the very foundation of what development in its truest sense ought to mean. The judiciary is not flawless. But if we are serious about reform, we must look beyond distortions on vacations and delays and confront the structural failings that lie elsewhere.
Suhrith Parthasarathy is an advocate practising in the Madras High Court
Published – October 07, 2025 12:16 am IST
