Tareekh Pe Tareekh or Waiting for Godot. The Quagmire That Is the Indian Judicial System: A Victim Writes

A citizen counts the days: an RTI from a Noida courtroom, and what it reveals about the holiest cow in the republic

There is a scene every Indian of a certain age can recite from memory. Sunny Deol, voice cracking, telling a courtroom that all he ever got was tareekh pe tareekh, tareekh pe tareekh, date after date after date, but never insaaf. We laughed, we clapped, we went home. What we did not do, what we never do, was ask why a film from 1993 still describes the system flawlessly in 2026. Thirty-three years. A whole generation has been born, grown up, married, buried its parents, and started giving its own children the same advice my father gave me: beta, court-kachehri se door raho. Stay away from the courts. It is, when you sit with it, an astonishing thing to inherit, this settled, almost cellular belief that the one institution built to give you justice is the one institution you should pray you never need.

I want to write about that institution today. And I should say at the outset that I know this is not done.

The Indian judiciary is a holy cow. You may criticise the Prime Minister, the army, your gods, your own mother, but raise a doubt about a judge and you will be told, in tones of wounded reverence, that you are eroding institutions. The higher judiciary holds near-absolute power and answers to almost no one, and the quiet genius of the arrangement is that the same people who hold the power get to decide what counts as contempt of it. So let me be careful, and let me be boring. I am not going to call anyone names. I am only going to count.

Because counting, it turns out, is the most subversive thing a citizen can still legally do.

The unromantic thing

The official explanation for why an Indian case takes two or three decades is always the same: we don't have enough judges. India runs about twenty-one judges per million people against a recommended fifty to fifty-five; roughly a third of High Court seats and a fifth of subordinate seats lie vacant, with nearly five thousand sanctioned posts in the lower judiciary empty on any given day. All true. All in the data. I do not dispute a word of it.

But it nagged at me, this explanation, because it is so convenient. It asks for more of the same and absolves everything that already exists. So I did the unromantic thing. I filed a Right to Information application with the District and Sessions Court of Gautam Budh Nagar, which is Noida more or less, a court serving one of the densest and most litigious belts in the country, and I asked the dullest questions I could think of. How many days was this court closed? How many days were the lawyers on strike?

Here is what came back, on court letterhead, signed by the Chief Administrative Officer.

In 2022, the court was closed for 100 days. The advocates were on strike for 73 days. Add the fifty-two Sundays and you are looking, on the plainest arithmetic, at somewhere around 140 working days in a year of three hundred and sixty-five. In 2023 it was the same story: 98 days closed, 74 days of strike, landing again near five working months in a twelve-month year.

Now I am going to be honest with you, because this is exactly the spot where a polemicist cheats and hopes you will not notice. It is possible that the hundred "closed" days already swallowed the Sundays, in which case you should not count those Sundays twice, and the true figure of actual functioning floats up to perhaps six and a half months. Fine. Take the kinder number. Either way, the court breathes for half the year and sleeps for the other half, and this is before a single judge has taken a single day of personal leave, before a single matter has been adjourned because counsel was unavailable.

Five months. Maybe six. To dispose of a city's worth of grief.

And here is the part the "more judges" chorus will not look at. Of the days that vanished, the single largest removable chunk had nothing to do with a shortage of judges. The bench was there. The bench was willing. The bench was air-conditioned and waiting.

The lawyers walked out.

The mountain, and the excuse

To understand why those lost days matter, you have to first see the size of the thing they are lost against.

Tier	Pending cases (early 2026)	Share of total
Supreme Court of India	~92,800 (April 2026)	~0.17%
High Courts (25)	~6.30 million (63 lakh)	~11.7%
District and subordinate courts	~4.80 crore (48.0 million)	~88.2%
All tiers	over 54 million	100%

(Source: National Judicial Data Grid and PRS Legislative Research compilations, 2025 to 2026.)

Fifty-four million cases. Up roughly eighty percent in a decade. Nearly nine in ten of them sitting not in the marbled Supreme Court that gets all the television cameras, but in the district and subordinate courts that get almost none. A Daksh study of district courts put the average pendency per case at over five years, around 1,953 days; the Economic Survey of 2017 to 2018, in a chapter it actually titled "Timely Justice," found that cases awaiting final judgment had an average age close to 7.9 years. A study commissioned by the Law Ministry estimated that a matter in the top courts can take ten to fifteen years from filing to conclusion once you account for every stage and every stay, with stays alone eating up as much as six and a half years in some sampled cases.

So when somebody tells you the cure is simply more judges, understand what the evidence actually says, because the evidence is more interesting and more damning than the slogan. The serious decompositions, from Law Commission Report 245 to the National Judicial Data Grid's own "delay reasons" module, point in the same direction: vacancies are a genuine and binding constraint, yes, but they sit alongside a structural gap where new filings outrun disposals year after year, a culture of adjournments and stays, infrastructure that in a quarter of district courts lacks basic amenities, bar strikes, and, towering over all of it, one litigant who is bigger than every other litigant in the country combined. We will come to him.

The point, for now, is this. Adding judges to a system that is closed half the year, that lets the State flood it with frivolous appeals, and that selects its own elite behind a locked door, is like pouring more water into a bucket whose hole nobody will discuss. You will feel busy. You will not get dry.

The colonial calendar

Let us start with the part everyone loves to be outraged about, because it deserves outrage, though not quite the kind it usually gets.

Court vacations in India are a colonial inheritance, plain and simple. They began as the practice of European judges in the old Federal Court and the High Courts fleeing the Indian summer, just as the Raj itself shifted its capital to the hills when the plains grew unbearable. The Raj stopped doing that decades ago. Only Jammu and Kashmir keeps the old durbar move alive in any form. But the courts kept the ghost of it, and they keep it still, in air-conditioned rooms, performed by judges who have never once needed a hill station for the reason the calendar quietly assumes.

Here is roughly how the Indian tiers compare, by working days in a year:

Tier (India)	Approximate working days
Supreme Court	~190 (various official replies cite 193 to 222)
High Courts	~210
District courts	~245
Central Civil Services (for comparison)	~244

And here is the comparison everyone gets wrong, so I want to put it down carefully:

Apex court	Approximate annual sitting days
United States Supreme Court	~68
Australia (High Court)	~97
South Africa (Constitutional Court)	~128
United Kingdom Supreme Court	~149
Bangladesh (apex court)	~183
India (Supreme Court)	~190

Read that table twice, because it is the opposite of what the angry op-eds tell you. India's Supreme Court actually sits more days than the apex courts of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa. The scandal of the higher judiciary's vacations is therefore not really that it sits too few days. By global standards it does not. The scandal is twofold and subtler. First, it is a symbol: a seven-week colonial summer block, surviving for no reason a modern citizen can identify with, in an institution drowning in fifty-four million cases. Second, and more cuttingly, look down at the district courts in that first table. They are scheduled to sit the most days of all, around two hundred and forty-five, more than the higher courts, more even than the central services. On paper, the lower courts are the workhorses.

And yet my RTI from Noida found a district court functioning for something like five months. So where did the paper promise of two hundred and forty-five days go?

It did not go to vacations. The lower courts barely get those; they are classified, in a phrase of pure bureaucratic comedy, as a "Vacation Department," which means their officers are denied full earned leave precisely so that they can take the long breaks the higher courts have turned into a constitutional birthright. The subordinate judge, the one actually clearing the mountain, gets neither the long vacation nor the freedom of the higher bench, and is supervised, transferred, and appraised like any other government servant. The man at the top gets the holiday and the immunity. The man at the bottom gets the docket.

I will be honest one more time. The careful studies say that vacations, taken alone, are a second-order cause of the backlog. Reform every recess tomorrow and you will not clear fifty-four million cases, because the recess is not where most of the time is lost. I accept that completely. But a second-order cause that also happens to be an unanswerable colonial relic, performed by the only institution in the country that has refused to modernise, is worth keeping on the table, if only as the loose thread you pull to find everything else.

The bar that bolts the door

We have trained ourselves to picture judicial delay as something the judges do to us. It is more honest, and far more uncomfortable, to admit that over the decades the bar, the lawyers, our own paid representatives, the people we hire to fight for us, have learned to hold the court hostage just as effectively, and with almost none of the scrutiny.

A strike, you see, does not show up as a closure. It is not in the calendar. Officially the court is open; it is simply that nobody appears. And the numbers, once you go looking for them, stop being abstract. Seventy-three and seventy-four days a year in Noida is bad enough. But the Law Commission's own data on working days lost to lawyer strikes, in courts an hour up the road from where I grew up, reads like something invented to make a point:

District / court	Working days lost to strikes	Period
Muzaffarnagar	791	2011 to 2016
Kancheepuram	687	comparable period
Haridwar	515	2012 to 2016
Dehradun	455	2012 to 2016
Gautam Budh Nagar (my RTI)	73 in 2022; 74 in 2023	per year

(Source: Law Commission of India analyses on lawyer strikes; Gautam Budh Nagar figures from RTI No. 18/2024.)

Muzaffarnagar lost seven hundred and ninety-one working days to strikes in about five years. Run the division. That is more than half of every single working year surrendered, not to vacation, not to vacancy, but to the black coats deciding the shop would stay shut. The Law Commission itself recommended severe curbs and penalties for chronic disruptors. Nothing much happened, because the people who would have to enforce the curb are drawn from the very profession being curbed, and the people who suffer the strike have no union of their own.

So ask yourself the question I cannot stop asking. What does a lawyer earn if he can keep the shutters down for a third of the year, sometimes half, and still send his children to good schools? And on whose back, exactly, does that comfortable arithmetic balance?

It balances on the litigant. On the aam aadmi. On the man who took a day of unpaid leave from the factory, paid two hundred rupees for the bus, and reached the court at nine in the morning to be told there is a strike today, kal aana, come tomorrow. Tareekh pe tareekh. Except this time the tareekh was not the judge's doing. It was his own vakeel's.

A few hundred families

If the strikes are how the system loses its days, dynasty is how it keeps its doors.

I am going to give you the figures and then mostly get out of the way, because they do not need my adjectives. ThePrint went and actually counted the sitting Supreme Court. Of its thirty-three judges, roughly ten were related to former judges, and another ten had fathers at the bar, which is to say that around sixty percent of the highest court in the land is drawn from judge or lawyer families. They did the same exercise for the High Courts: of nearly seven hundred permanent judges as of March 2025, over a hundred had relatives who had been judges, and another hundred and eighteen had relatives in the legal profession. Roughly one in three.

The Law Commission has a polite institutional name for one flavour of this. It is the "uncle judge" syndrome, where the nephew or close relative of a sitting judge happens to practise, and to prosper, in the very same court. In its 230th Report the Commission recommended that judges simply not be posted to courts where their relatives practise. The rates it documented:

High Court	Judges with close relatives practising in the same court
Punjab & Haryana	16 of 47 (34.0%)
Allahabad	15 of 65 (23.0%)
Kerala	12 of 54 (22.2%)
Bombay	13 of 63 (20.6%)
Calcutta	14 of 69 (20.3%)

(Source: Law Commission of India, 230th Report.)

And then there are the surnames that have supplied this republic with Chief Justices across three generations:

Family	Span	A few of the names
Chandrachud	3 generations	Vishnu Chandrachud (Diwan of Sawantwadi); Y. V. Chandrachud (16th CJI, 1978 to 1985, the longest-serving); D. Y. Chandrachud (50th CJI, 2022 to 2024); his sons, both advocates and legal scholars
Misra	3 generations	Godavaris Mishra (Education Minister, Orissa); Ranganath Misra (21st CJI); Dipak Misra, his nephew (45th CJI); Devananda Misra, his son (Senior Advocate)
Beg	2 generations	Mirza Samiullah Beg (Chief Justice, Hyderabad State); M. Hameedullah Beg (15th CJI); Mirza Nasirullah Beg (Chief Justice, Allahabad High Court)
Thakur	2 generations	Devi Das Thakur (J&K High Court judge, Governor of Assam); T. S. Thakur (43rd CJI); Dhiraj Singh Thakur (Chief Justice, Andhra Pradesh High Court)

This is the shape people are gesturing at when they say a few hundred families, give or take, supply a wildly disproportionate share of the people who decide whether the rest of us ever see justice. I will not pretend to a precise count of those families, because no honest, peer-reviewed database tracking every appointment since 1950 exists; the figures above come from journalistic investigations and the Law Commission, with all the coding limits that implies. But the direction is not in serious doubt.

And lest anyone tell you this is merely the sweet romance of children following their parents into the family trade, consider the other end of the pipeline. A survey of women advocates practising in the Delhi region found that around eighty-four percent of them were first-generation lawyers. The outsiders, the ones without the surname and the chamber and the Sunday-lunch network of senior counsel, are precisely the people the system does not reliably elevate. The composition data point the same way: by one historian's count, more than ninety percent of Supreme Court judges appointed between 1950 and 1989 came from the upper castes; among High Court judges appointed between 2018 and 2024, the figure was still around seventy-eight percent, with women at roughly fourteen percent of the bench.

Now I have to be scrupulous here, because this is where a lazy writer lies, and I would rather lose the rhetorical flourish than mislead you. The single most rigorous study we have, an analysis of over five million criminal cases between 2010 and 2018, found essentially no in-group bias in outcomes. A judge sharing your caste, your faith, or your surname did not, on the numbers, make you more likely to be convicted or acquitted, and it did not measurably change how fast your case moved. So let me state the charge precisely. The rot is not, provably, in how the higher judiciary decides cases once you are before it. The charge is about who is permitted to become a judge in the first place, and about a route of entry so closed and so hereditary that it has quietly drained the bench of nearly everyone who does not already belong to the world it draws from. That is a claim about access, not about verdict-rigging. It does not need a conspiracy. It only needs a family tree, and a locked door.

Judges who choose judges

So how does a club like this renew itself without anyone outside it getting a vote? Here is the feature that, as far as I can find, has no real parallel in any major democracy. In India, judges appoint judges.

The mechanism, called the Collegium, was not in the original Constitution. It was built, ruling by ruling, by the Court itself:

Stage	What it did
Articles 124(2) and 217(1)	Original text: the President appoints judges in "consultation" with the Chief Justice. Executive primacy.
First Judges Case (S. P. Gupta, 1981)	Held that "consultation" does not mean "concurrence." The executive keeps the final word.
Second Judges Case (1993)	Reversed S. P. Gupta. The Chief Justice's opinion gets primacy. Created the Collegium of the CJI plus the two senior-most judges.
Third Judges Case (1998)	Expanded the Collegium to the CJI plus the four senior-most judges. A reiterated recommendation becomes binding on the government.
NJAC Judgment (2015)	Struck down, by 4 to 1, the 99th Constitutional Amendment and the National Judicial Appointments Commission, holding that letting the executive into the process violated the basic structure.

Read down that table and watch the power move, decade by decade, out of the hands of the elected branch and into the hands of the bench, until in 2015 the bench struck down even Parliament's attempt to put a single outside voice into the room. The Collegium picks its own successors, in private, historically without published reasons, and judges its own conduct.

Compare that to anywhere else. Britain has a Judicial Appointments Commission, an independent body that takes open applications against published criteria. The United States has Senate confirmation, with hearings carried live. Germany elects its constitutional judges through Parliament. Even executive-led Singapore involves the Prime Minister and Chief Justice together. In every one of these systems, someone outside the robe has a say. Only here does the institution fully select itself, define its own accountability, and then decide the limits of what you are allowed to say about all of it.

The State stands first in the queue

Before you even reach a judge, you have to reach the front of the line. And the figure standing ahead of you in that line, more often than not, is the government itself.

The State, meaning the Union, the states, and the public-sector behemoths, is the single largest litigant in the country. By the Department of Justice's own reckoning in its 2017 action plan, government-related matters made up around forty-six percent of pending cases; other estimates put the share of government-linked litigation closer to half. And the State's own senior judges have estimated that the great bulk of its appeals are frivolous or repetitive: the government loses, appeals out of reflex, loses again, appeals again, all of it on your time and your money. The Union's own case-tracking portal recorded something like six lakh pending cases involving the central government alone, and that does not even count the states and the public-sector undertakings.

So picture it plainly. The sarkar clogs the corridor with cases it knows it will lose, and the citizen with a genuine grievance waits behind it for years, paying a private lawyer out of his own pocket while the State litigates against him out of his own taxes. The house always plays, and the house never runs out of chips.

Answerable to no one

I have saved the smallest and sharpest cut for last, because it was sitting right there in my own RTI and I very nearly walked past it.

My final question to the Noida court was simple and pointed. Under what provision of law are people who have been granted interim bail still kept in lockup until the bail is processed, and why is this not the practice in the Delhi courts a few kilometres away? It is exactly the kind of question a citizen has every right to ask about how his own liberty is handled.

The answer, in full, was that the question is barred under the Allahabad High Court's Right to Information rules, Rule 25.

Read that again. Not we do not know. Not here is the law and the reasoning. The citizen asked the court a question about the citizen's own freedom, and the court's reply was that he is not permitted to ask it.

That single sentence is the whole disease in miniature. Set it beside the larger facts. In the entire constitutional history of this republic, not one Supreme Court or High Court judge has ever been removed by impeachment. Not even Justice V. Ramaswami, who a judicial inquiry committee found guilty on eleven of fourteen charges of financial misconduct, because when the motion reached the Lok Sabha the ruling party simply abstained and let it die. Asset disclosures for the higher judiciary remain voluntary and unevenly observed. There is no published performance metric, no record of which judge clears his docket and which one hoards it. An institution with near-total power, near-zero external accountability, and now, it turns out, the formal authority to refuse your questions. Mai-baap used to be a phrase of grovelling deference. It was never meant to read as a job description.

Police, vakeel, judge: the three who break the back

Stand back from the institutions for a moment and look at the citizen they exist to serve, because the cruelty of the thing is cumulative, and it is delivered by three hands, not one.

First the police, who control the very gate: the FIR that is not registered, the investigation that crawls, the man held in custody while the paperwork that should free him moves at the speed of a sleeping clerk. Then the lawyer, our own side, who has learned that delay is a business model, that an adjournment is a fee, and who can, when it suits the bar, shut the court entirely. And then the judge, at the far end, around whom the years pile up, who is overburdened where he is willing and untouchable where he is not. Police, vakeel, judge. Three sets of hands, and the same back breaks under all of them.

And it is an expensive back to break. Contract enforcement in India, by the old World Bank measure, took close to four years; in Singapore the comparable dispute resolves in under ten months. Four years for a commercial matter is the optimistic case. For the aam aadmi with a land dispute or a property quarrel, the figure that matters is not the court's average, it is his own lifespan, because the case routinely outlives the man who filed it. The middle-class family sells the very asset it went to court to protect, in order to keep paying for a fight whose verdict, when it finally comes, arrives addressed to a dead petitioner and an exhausted heir. This is what "justice delayed is justice denied" actually looks like on the ground. It is not a proverb. It is a balance sheet.

The last colony

What I keep returning to is how alone the courts now stand in their refusal to change.

I am old enough to remember what dealing with the Indian state used to feel like. The passport that took six months and a quiet bribe. The ration office. The licence babu with his cup of tea and his infinite patience for your suffering. And I am living, right now, in a country where most of that has been quietly and genuinely overturned. A passport in a week. Money moving between strangers in two seconds on a phone. Documents sitting in a DigiLocker. The whole grinding machinery of the citizen-facing state has been dragged, complaining, into this century. Administration reformed. Policy reformed. The babu, more or less, learned to serve.

The court did not get the memo.

It is still keeping a calendar built for white judges who needed to escape the plains, still running a self-appointing inner circle that would be unthinkable in any peer democracy, still treating its own subordinate officers as a "Vacation Department" while reserving the long holidays and the immunity for the top. The whole structure is a museum that charges admission in years of your life.

And so nobody identifies with it. That is, in the end, the saddest line I can write. People in this country will queue overnight outside a temple, weep at a cricket match, fight strangers online for the honour of a film star, but ask them to feel anything for the institution that is supposed to embody their justice, and you will get a shrug, and that old paternal warning, passed down like a family heirloom. Court-kachehri se door raho. You cannot reform what the people have already left. And the people left a long time ago.

What is to be done

I do not have a tidy ten-point plan for you, and I distrust anyone who hands you one at the bottom of a blog post. The serious work is already known and already written. Curb the government's frivolous appeals through a litigation policy with teeth. Fill the empty seats, guided by real caseload data rather than a crude population ratio. Break the bar's licence to bolt the doors whenever it pleases, with the penalties the Law Commission itself recommended. Prise open the Collegium so that someone other than the robe gets a vote, perhaps through the hybrid model so many reformers have argued for, neither the old executive capture nor pure judicial self-selection. Put the higher judiciary on something closer to the same clock, and the same scrutiny, as the citizen it judges. Move the routine appeals out of the apex court so it can do the constitutional work only it can do. None of this is exotic. All of it has been recommended by committees whose reports gather the only dust in the building that nobody seems to mind.

But it begins, I think, with refusing the reverence. A republic does not become great on the strength of a justice system that delivers in decades, that bankrupts the middle class to fund a fight whose verdict outlives the petitioner, and that answers to no one, least of all to the man who built it and paid for it and was told, at the window, that he was not even allowed to ask.

So I filed an RTI. It is a small, almost laughable weapon, a single sheet of paper against a marble institution. But it is the only one they have not yet learned to take away.

Tareekh pe tareekh, saheb. Lekin ab hisaab bhi hoga.

Sources and further reading

• ThePrint, "Lineage runs deep in India's Supreme Court: 60 judges are from lawyer or judge families" — https://theprint.in/judiciary/lineage-runs-deep-in-indias-supreme-court-60-judges-are-from-lawyer-or-judge-families/2573937/
• India's Courts: In-Group Bias study (Ash, Asher and colleagues), via SHRUG — https://shrug-assets-ddl.s3.amazonaws.com/static/main/assets/other/India_Courts_In_Group_Bias.pdf
• National Law School of India Review article (judicial appointments and the Collegium) — https://repository.nls.ac.in/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1080&context=nlsir
• Additional academic paper (judicial families and dynasties), via CORE — https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/302353916.pdf
• Law Commission of India, Report No. 230 (reforms in the judiciary; the "uncle judge" syndrome and its court-wise rates).
• Law Commission of India, Report No. 245 (arrears and backlog; on judicial manpower being necessary but not sufficient); and Law Commission analyses on working days lost to lawyer strikes.
• National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) dashboards and PRS Legislative Research compilations on pendency, disposal, and vacancies, 2025 to 2026.
• George H. Gadbois, Jr., Judges of the Supreme Court of India: 1950 to 1989 (Oxford University Press), on the historical caste and background composition of the bench.
• Economic Survey 2017 to 2018, "Timely Justice" chapter; Daksh studies on case lifecycles in High Courts and district courts; and the World Bank's contract-enforcement metrics for the India versus Singapore comparison.
• RTI No. 18/2024, District and Sessions Court, Gautam Budh Nagar (reply dated 07 May 2024), reproduced as received.

A note on method: the figures above are drawn from the sources named, several of them journalistic or commission datasets that carry their own sampling and coding limits, which I have tried to flag honestly in the text rather than launder into false precision. The case lifecycle and pendency numbers move year to year; treat them as the shape of the problem, not the last decimal of it.