Rules of the Law-II

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: The Supreme Court accounts for only a small share of the pendency. What is however odd is that 10 years ago, the Supreme Court was able to reduce the pendency to a shade less than 20,000 and at that point, this was lauded as a demonstrated success of better case management and IT usage. In 1950, the pendency in the Supreme Court was 771 cases. By 1978, pendency was 23,092 and in 1983 pendency crossed 1,00,000. On 31 December 1991, the number of cases pending before the Supreme Court was 1,34,221. Then this number was substantially reduced to 19,806 in 1998 and it was 21,715 at the end of 2001. Since those days of reduction, the pendency has increased by between 13% and 15% every year and has more than doubled. Compared to the all-India pendency figures, even 50,000 is a small number. But surely some explanation should have been forthcoming about what has now gone wrong with the Supreme Court. In 2007, the Supreme Court disposed of 61,957 cases.

This is the right place to draw a possible distinction between the terms pendency, arrears, delay and backlog, often used synonymously. Pendency simply means the total number of cases in the court system. High levels of pendency indicate faith in the judicial system. Arrears are an excess of new cases over disposed cases. Arrears contribute to delays. Delays are old cases that aren’t disposed of. The word backlog is sometimes used in the sense of pendency and sometimes in the sense of delays. Given these different senses in which these terms are used, perhaps one should eventually transit to a term like court congestion. This will also be more in conformity with international usage. The total pendency in the court system, excluding other quasi-judicial forums, now amounts to 29.1 million—46,926 in the Supreme Court, 3.7 million in High Courts and 25.4 million in Lower Courts.

High Courts