There's a certain callousness to that kind of procedure. Four men of the Scheduled Tribe and Other Backward Classes were waiting in a Jharkhand jail. Their criminal case was heard, argued and concluded by Jharkhand High Court as back as 2022. The arguing was over. The witnesses had testified. All was left for a judge to write. This took two, then three years. The order was not even posted on the website of the High Court, or on their advocates' websites, when it was eventually published in December 2025. The men had won but they were not yet aware.

That case went before the Supreme Court of India Friday, May 29th and what emerged from it was much more than just a relief to four people. A Bench led by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant activated the extraordinary jurisdiction of the Supreme Court under Article 142 of the Constitution of India and gave instructions to all 25 High Courts in the country to establish a proper structure and guidelines for delivering judgments in a time-bound manner. The constitution says the Supreme Court can issue such an order as may be necessary for the purpose of delivering ‘complete justice'. On this occasion, the court has issued the order, not to resolve a single dispute, but to put an end to a long-standing systemic failure.

The instructions themselves are not unclear. Reserved judgements are now to be delivered within not more than three months in all High Courts. Bail orders must be delivered on the same day or, if reserved, the next day. If bail is granted to undertrial prisoners, they have to be released the same day after formalities. All judgements, after they are announced, to be uploaded on High Court websites within 24 hours. The court further explained that, while this might seem like a technicality, there are legal implications to this requirement: the date of the operative portion of a judgment shall be considered a judgment date. That ends a loophole that had the clock running the clock.

One thing the court was careful about: The directions were to be "neutral," not meant to reflect on any judge, any institution. That's a diplomatic way to put it and a good one. But it must not overshadow the structural, pervasive and intolerable problem that these directions are in fact attempting to address.

The magnitude of these directions to fix is overwhelming. This makes India's total pending caseload 54 million cases at the end of 2025, which is an 80% increase in the past 10 years. Of those, 17.2 million cases remain pending for over a five-year period. More than 85% of that burden falls on the district and subordinate courts the first place of contact with the justice system that most Indians have. The High Courts alone have more than 63.66 lakh pending cases which are growing by 4.75% over a mere three years.

This is really alarming, and there is a statistic to prove it. At the current rate of disposal of cases, it would take 324 years to clear the backlog, according to a paper prepared by the NITI Aayog once, at that time. The pending number at that time was 29 million, which has almost doubled since then. In 2024, the Case Clearance Rate (CCR) of High Courts was 94% which may appear satisfactory, but it means that for every 100 new cases filed, 94 were disposed of, resulting in a backlog of 6 cases for every 100 new cases that are filed, every single year.

This human cost is not abstract. Of India's total of 4.2 lakh prisoners, two-thirds are undertrials, who have not been convicted of any offence and are languishing for months, sometimes years, or decades awaiting trial. A lot end up getting acquitted and set free after having spent a considerable part of their life in jail. When the Supreme Court says it wants to hear that the bail order be sent to the jail on the same day on which it is issued, it is saying something that shouldn't have needed a Supreme Court order namely, that the freedom of people who were legally granted bail was being frustrated because of lack of movement in paperwork.

The cost of delay is seldom a subject of public discourse, yet it should be. According to several studies, the annual GDP loss due to judicial delays in India is estimated at 1.5–2%. That means thousands of crores of investment that have become frozen, assets that are not moving, and the presence of zombie companies that are not able to be resolved under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, because of the delays in the resolution cases, and a gradual loss of business confidence. The average time period for resolving property disputes in India is 20 years. By World Bank measures, enforcement of contracts in India took, and still takes, more than 1400 days. There is an element of legal uncertainty that domestic entrepreneurs consider before investing their money. In other words, the courts are not just a social institution, but also something of a piece of economic infrastructure, and the infrastructure is eating away from the inside.

The total judiciary budget of India for 2026–27 is $540 million, which is about 0.08% of the total budget of the country. In similar democracies UK, Canada, Australia that proportion is three to four times higher. The judiciary is being asked to take on the dispute of an entire nation of 1.4 billion people while its budget is the size of a medium-sized infrastructure project. The average judge in India presently has over 2200 pending cases. It's not about personal performance or ‘will power'. It's a problem of structural underfunding that's been presented as an institutional failure.

The Jharkhand case that prompted the order on Friday is more a symptom of the problem. One kind of delay is particularly common and uniquely frustrating and that is reserved judgments, where the hearings are finished, and a judge has said he or she is "under consideration" of a case without issuing a decision. The legal battle has come to an end. The case has been argued. Only a written decision is outstanding. But reserved judgments often wait for months, even years, without a system in place to ensure they are issued. The Registrar General will have to now send the case to the Chief Justice of the High Court, in whose jurisdiction the judgment is reserved, for pronouncement within three months of the judgment being reserved, and if it is not pronounced within 3 months of that date then the Chief Justice may give another 2 weeks for pronouncement. The two week escalation window is a backstop, not a preference, the expectation is three months.

Friday's orders are not the first from the Supreme Court that deals with the topic. Justices Sanjay Karol and Prashant Kumar Mishra had recently reaffirmed in August 2025 that the case be referred to the Chief Justice by the Registrar General if it is not delivered within three months of reserving the order, which is essentially what the May 29, 2024, bench has now done through Article 142. So what is different is that this time the constitutional instrument used is different. Directions issued under Article 142 are binding while observations/recommendations by the courts are not binding. These are not "advisory" for High Courts.

Then there's the digital transparency aspect which can be underrated. The 24-hour rule for publication of all judgments on High Court websites is a reflection of the fact that, in the digital age, timely availability of judgments is a requirement for lawyers, litigants, researchers and the public. The litigants from Jharkhand whose lawyers were unable to see the December 2025 order are an example of what's happening in so many courts judgments are rendered and never made public to those impacted. The decision to make upload compulsory in 24 hours is at the heart of it a transparency mandate. It also produces accountability – it is obvious and can be established if a judgment is not posted.

The big picture of structure, however, has yet to be resolved. These are substantive reforms, with the three-month time limit and the bail-day provisions. They establish discipline at a phase of the judicial process, the reserved judgment phase, which had been normalised to the point of invisibility. They, however, do not answer the question of the origin of the 54 million pending cases in India, of the judiciary budget of 0.08 per cent of the total expenditure and of the failure to keep pace in the number of sitting judges with population growth and volume of litigations.

Justice Pradeep Nandrajog, retired chief justice of Bombay and Rajasthan High Courts, has argued that if there is no major reform of the system, people may lose their faith in the judicial system: "We are pushing the judicial organ towards lawlessness, many feel that it has already collapsed; timely justice is essential.

That's a very strong line of demarcation, but not an unreasonable one. While this does not imply that there is anything wrong with the Indian judiciary on a very basic level, it is definitely a legitimacy crisis, as there's a disconnect between what people require from the system and what the justice system can provide.This does not mean that there's some sort of corruption in the Indian judiciary in a very basic sense, but definitely there is a legitimacy crisis because there's a disconnect between what people require from the justice system and what the justice system can provide. People resolve things by paying, fighting or having someone, as they know that the courts won't resolve things in any meaningful time frame. That, after all, isn't a fault of any one judge. This is a systemic result.

That's why the Supreme Court's Article 142 intervention, which was released on Friday, is important: it brings measurable, enforceable accountability in a space where there was none. The three-month judgment rule won't diminish the backlog. It will not bring back the decades that have been stolen from the prisoners who should never have been locked up. However, it makes clear that delay is not an administrative default to be tolerated, but is a violation of rights, and the court of last resort has now pronounced it in a manner that cannot be ignored.

That the High Courts do not have in practice the infrastructure, judicial strength and institutional will to do so is another question. The directions are necessary. These are not enough. But India's judiciary cannot afford a mere deadline, it must have a budget, a staffing plan, a digital backbone and a national political commitment to make access to justice more than a constitutional aspiration. Till then, the courts will continue to receive cases and the backlogs will continue to swell and four men from Jharkhand will not be the last ones to win a case only to be defeated by time.