The judiciary in India continues to struggle with pendency and delays, and the Supreme Court is no exception. This challenge is often framed as the responsibility of the sitting Chief Justice of India, who is the administrative head. However, pendency is more accurately diagnosed as an institutional problem requiring structural reforms, not personality-driven or tenure-bound interventions.
Over the last three years, the Supreme Court Registry undertook two major exercises to tackle pendency. This article examines their effectiveness, limitations and the deeper accountability concerns they raise.
Rising pendency
According to the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG), as of 25 December 2025, 91,677 cases were pending before the Supreme Court. Of these, 21,775 are unregistered matters, i.e., cases filed with defects, missing documents or errors that remain unrectified and therefore not in judicial consideration yet.
Excluding these, the number of cases ripe for hearing stands at 69,902. A further refinement emerges when tagged matters are separated out. As of February 2025, 23,886 cases were tagged to main matters, often arising from large or complex disputes where multiple parties file separate petitions on the same issue. Removing these tagged matters, we can say that around 46,000 cases require priority consideration.
The Court’s strike rate isn’t so bad
As per the NJDG, between 2018 and 25 December 2025, the Court disposed of 3,18,689 cases against 3,28,357 filings—an annual average clearance rate of 97.1 percent. In the last three years (covering the tenures of Chief Justices Chandrachud, Khanna and Gavai), the clearance rate of registered cases exceeded or was close to 100 percent, meaning that more—or almost as many—cases were disposed of than were instituted.
The data suggests that the persistence of backlog is not for want of productivity but largely due to the rising rate of fresh filings. For instance, the increase in pendency during the tenure of CJI Gavai is not because of the disposal of fewer cases, but because 12,000 more cases were instituted this year as compared to last year.
