Justice Bhushan Ramkrishna Gavai was sworn in as the 52nd Chief Justice of India at a ceremony in the Rashtrapati Bhavan on May 14. His ascension is a watershed moment, in which a person from the lowest rung of society has been elevated to the highest post of the judiciary.

Also, Justice BR Gavai starts his innings as the Chief Justice of India at a time when the criminal justice system in Bharat is in disarray and faces myriads of existential crises.

In this concluding part of the series on the ‘State of criminal justice system’ – after analysing the broken system and creating a case for substantive reforms in policing and prisons – we delve deeper into the immediate need to reform the criminal judicial system.

Like other arms of the criminal justice system, the judiciary, too, faces multiple issues, including but not limited to high pendency of cases, low number of judges, persisting vacancies, low case clearance rates, fewer convictions and corruption at the lower echelons of the judiciary.

Chief Justice Gavai, who will be at the helm of the Supreme Court for a short duration, has the daunting task more difficult than squaring a circle.

A question arises here as to how overstretched the judiciary is. The short answer to this is “bleak". Here is a “tale of two tales", which succinctly describes the “state of criminal judicial system".

Former CJI Justice Ranjan Gogoi recently said in an interview: “…in the Allahabad High Court, judges are still hearing 40-year-old criminal appeals. This means that if a person was convicted at the age of 30, they are now around 75 to 80 years old and still waiting for justice… Criminal trials must be completed within three to four years, at most. Today, in states like Uttar Pradesh, appeals remain stuck for decades. A person convicted by the trial court may wait 20 years before the high court even hears the appeal. If the high court later finds them innocent, what compensation can be given for those lost years?"

Coming from a previous CJI, this presents a harrowing picture. In 2003, the committee on reforms of criminal justice system Government of India headed by Justice VS Malimath noted:

“A former Chief Justice of India warned nearly a decade ago that the criminal justice system in India was about to collapse. It is common knowledge that the two major problems besieging the criminal justice system are huge pendency of criminal cases and the inordinate delay in disposal of criminal cases on the one hand and the very low rate of conviction in cases involving serious crimes on the other. This has encouraged crime. Violent and organised crimes have become the order of the day. As chances of convictions are remote, crime has become a profitable business. Life has become unsafe, and people live in constant fear. Law and order situation has deteriorated, and the citizens have lost confidence in the criminal justice system."

What was true in 2003 is truer in 2025.

Unsurprisingly, between 1953 and 2023, the cognisable crimes in India rose 9.67 times from about 0.6 million to about 5.8 million, while the population grew 3.82 times in the same period. Notably, the crime rate more than doubled during this period, from 160 in 1953 to 422.2 in 2023.

A key message here is that while the number of cognizable cases are growing much faster than the population, pending criminal cases in the court are increasing due to the dwindling number of disposals and fast addition of new cases every year. As if this is not bad enough, the ground situation is worsening fast.

Another disturbing feature of the........

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