On August 24, 2026, former Odisha high court Chief Justice S. Muralidhar delivered the 28th D. S. Borker Memorial Lecture on the theme “My Vision of India: 2047,” with senior advocate Indira Jaising chairing the session. Looking ahead to the centenary year of India’s Independence, Justice Muralidhar examined the persistent problems facing India’s legal system today, from hiking pendency and vacancies to overwork among judges, delays, legal education, technology and the role of lawyers and the government in the functioning of the legal system.

He emphasised the need to make the legal system more transparent, accountable and centred on the people for whom it was built. “The legal system, with its mystifying procedures and legalese, is designed to alienate, and not welcome, the user of the system. Even today, it is not possible for a litigant to navigate the legal maze without professional legal help,” he remarked. He argued that reform cannot simply mean appointing more judges or introducing new mechanisms, but required a “process re-engineering.”

The following is the full text of Justice Muralidhar’s lecture.

It is a privilege to be asked to deliver this lecture that honours the memory of Dattatraya Shrinivas Borker, a civil servant committed to transparency, constitutional fairness and public welfare. Recognised as an able administrator of uncompromising integrity, Mr. Borker is credited with many pioneering initiatives which included advocating urban planning to provide for parks and safe public zones.

Let me be permitted to take some liberties with the given title and substitute ‘My Vision’ with ‘A few visions of India 2047’. The past 79 years have told us that there are many imponderables and surprises in store that defy a predictable vision of where we are likely to find ourselves in twenty years from now. 

Among those who delivered the previous editions of this lecture instituted in 1999 – this is the 28th  – there have been two in the field of law. Senior Advocate Colin Gonsalves delivered the 18th lecture in 2015 and Justice A.P. Shah the 25th in 2023. Among the law persons who chaired the lectures, we have had three – Mr. Soli Sorabjee in 2012, Professor Upendra Baxi in 2017 and Justice Sanjay Kaul in 2023. This year it is a total takeover by lawyers. We have Syed Jafar Alam, a practising lawyer, introducing us. I am particularly honoured that Indira Jaising is chairing this lecture. She is an exemplar in the legal profession, having fought (and continuing to fight) for justice for the less privileged, for greater transparency and accountability of our institutions and in challenging the status quo. She has been a torch bearer for many generations of lawyers trying to find their feet. She continues to be an inspiration for many of us.  

In today’s lecture I will first speak on the vision of the Indian legal system for 2047 with a particular focus on the judiciary. Here I will speak more about judicial administration, a topic not much discussed, and less on what courts do on the judicial side, a topic that has been much discussed. Thereafter, time permitting, I propose to touch on a few other issues.

The broken legal system that we inherited has remained broken

Legal historians have told us that the Anglo-Saxon adversarial judicial system that was introduced sometime in the 18th century quickly became dysfunctional. In response, after eliciting the views of the then magistrates through a questionnaire, Lord Cornwallis promulgated on December 3, 1790, a scheme that transferred the administration of criminal justice to the hands of the East India Company’s English servants. Soon, this new system too failed. The judicial officers were accepting bribes with impunity, crime was promoted as criminals felt that money could save them from the law; proceedings in criminal courts were dilatory; prisons were overcrowded and insanitary. The 19th century was no different. In William Bentinck’s time in 1833 it was acknowledged that the criminal justice reforms had “failed to achieve the twin objects of a court viz., cheap and quick decision of cases.”

The same scenario played out in the 20th century. One of the first persons to respond to the Civil Justice Committee set up in 1923 to find ways for speedier and more economical disposal of cases conceded that “there is delay, in some cases very great delay, in the disposal of suits and appeals.” He, however, cautioned against short cuts that would compromise a fair procedure for the sake of quick disposal. A decade after independence, the 14th Law Commission of India (LCI), headed by the then Attorney General for India, prepared a comprehensive report suggesting a series of legal reform measures. It noted the pendency of over 10,00,000 civil suits and 40,00,000 criminal trials, excluding cases before the Sessions courts and high courts. The LCI acknowledged that “the present system of administration of justice is alien to our genius” but advised against abandoning it. The true remedy, said the LCI, lies in removing the defects that exist in the system and making it subserve in a greater degree our requirements for the present and the future.” It disagreed that the complexity of the procedural laws was the primary cause of judicial delays but “a host of extraneous and personal factors” like “an inefficient and inexperienced judiciary, insufficient number of judicial officers, and incompetent and corrupt ministerial and process serving agency, the diverse delaying tactics adopted by the litigants and their lawyers, the un-methodical arrangement of work by the presiding judge and the heavy file of arrears.”

The lament by Justice Krishna Iyer in 1992 in his inimitable style was that “for the lay person, the judicial process was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, with its baffling legalese, lottery techniques, habitual somnolence, expensive proclivities, multi-deck inconsistencies, tyranny of technicalities and interference in everything with a touch of authoritarian incompetence.”

So here we are, after 79 years, grappling with the same issues – too many cases, too few judges, costs, uncertainties and delays. The problem is complex, with moving parts that are imperfectly interlocked. Let me attempt helping all of you decipher it.

To state the obvious, we do not have enough judges. A few statistics need to be noticed. First, the district judiciary. The current pendency is over 5.1 crore cases, 80% of which are pending in the criminal courts. Around 29 lakh cases are instituted every month and every month our judges in the district courts dispose of 24 lakh cases. While the sanctioned strength is around 19,500 judges, at any given point in time the working strength is around 18,200 judges. The per judge load in the district judiciary is a staggering 2750 cases. Around 2.6 crore cases are freshly instituted every year and around 2.4 crore cases are disposed of. There is an unchanging pendency of around 5 crore cases. Basically, our judges in the district judiciary are running hard to stay in the same place.

Turning to the high courts, the current pendency is 65 lakh cases, of which 45 lakh are civil cases. The sanctioned strength is 1122 high court judges but the working strength is only 810. The per judge load is over 8000 cases, whereas the Malimath Committee in the 1980s recommended as feasible a load of 1500 cases for a high court judge. Over 10 lakh cases are instituted annually in our high courts and an almost equal number is disposed of, meaning the overall pendency remains the same. Again, high court judges are running hard to stay in the same place.

In the Supreme Court, the current pendency is nearly 93000 cases. The sanctioned strength was only recently raised to 38. At present there are 34 judges. The case load per judge is above 2400. In 2025 around 62,000 cases were instituted in the Supreme Court and nearly 57,000 cases disposed of.

Yes, the collective pendency of cases is the highest for any judiciary in the world. It reminds us of the work that remains to be done. But that is only part of the story. We need to acknowledge that a lot of work is being done by the existing judicial workforce that is clearly overworked.

While the Supreme Court manages to have a full complement of judges, we never had a full capacity of judges at any time in the district judiciary and in the high courts in our country’s 79-year journey. This is a kind of paradox because judges have to be appointed from amongst the lawyers and we currently have over 20,00,000 lawyers. The question naturally is, can we not find among this huge number of lawyers, a few who can fill up all of the vacancies in all the courts? While the logical answer ought to be in the affirmative, in practical terms the truth is that we are unable to find enough lawyers who fulfil all the requirements for being appointed as judges.

Let me explain this further. In the district judiciary there are two levels of judges – the Junior Division and the Senior Division also known as the Higher Judicial Service. At the Junior Division level the recruitment percentage in the recent past has been more than satisfactory. This is owed to a combination of factors. A better crop of law graduates coming through the five-year law course looking for a career in the judiciary. The selection process is quite rigorous – written exams followed by interviews. The mushrooming of coaching centres for these exams has certainly helped. Since the starting pay packet for a Junior Division judge is reasonably good, and there is security of tenure, this has attracted an increasing number of women law graduates. This augurs well for the system as a whole.

At the Senior Division level in the district judiciary, there are two broad streams of recruitment. 50% is from among serving Junior Division judges through promotion, 25% among them through departmental exams and the remaining 25% are to be filled up directly from among lawyers with a minimum of 10 years’ standing. There are written exams followed by an interview conducted by the judges of the high court. Year after year, a large number of these direct-recruit vacancies go unfilled. This reflects poorly on the competence of lawyers practising in the district judiciary. It also raises serious questions about the quality of legal education. More on this later.

For appointments of judges to the high courts, the procedure is more elaborate, involving the judiciary and the executive. Despite switching over in 1993 to a collegium system that gives primacy to the view of the CJI in the matter of appointments both to the Supreme Court and the high courts, there is now a general agreement that this has not served the objective of getting the best possible candidates. The appointment process has in the past twelve years witnessed unexplained interference by the executive. Compounding this is the vagueness about the criteria, a lack of transparency and an overall inefficiency. Let me explain the last bit. Although we know for certain what the date of retirement of each serving judge is, we are unable to select and keep the replacement ready to take over so that there is no vacancy. A few years ago, at the prodding of the National Court Management System (NCMS), we simply increased the sanctioned strength, without improving the appointment process. This made the vacancy position even worse. The prospect of never being able to catch up, even by 2047, is real.

The disclosure by the Supreme Court [during Justice Sanjiv Khanna’s tenure as Chief Justice of India (CJI)] of the criteria (called the Performance Appraisal Template) for evaluating candidates for appointment both to the HC and the SC is only a half-way house to transparency. We still need to know whether the candidates found eligible satisfied the criteria. We owe that disclosure to the people of this country. They must have the confidence that only the best among those available are being appointed to the HCs and the SC. One wishes this happens much before 2047.

The distinction between pendency and arrears

This has been said before, but needs reiteration. Our courts cannot be compared to automobile assembly lines and disposal of cases is not the same thing as assembling cars. It is too simplistic to think that by merely appointing more judges the existing pendency of cases can be effectively tackled. Every case filed in the system is not a pending case because it has to go through different stages before it can be said to be ready for a final hearing and disposal. Further, each category of case has a different life cycle having regard to its complexity. A murder case cannot be compared to a motor accident or a traffic violation case. There has to be, therefore, a scientific method of first determining what is the optimum time that can be taken for disposing of a particular type of a case and then finding out whether the judge dealing with it is able to meet that standard.

Then there are many cases among the 5.5 crores in the formal legal system that are actually dead cases; where the parties are no longer alive, the subject matter does not exist, the law has changed, the government’s position on the issue has changed irreversibly. Then there are absolutely petty and pointless cases. For example, booked for merely carrying 5 litres of illegally brewed alcohol or found with 5 kg of illegally felled firewood. These kinds of cases are pending for years on end and the ones harassed most are some poor........

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