Nearly 60 lakh cases pending in High Courts of India, 69,000 in Supreme Court

Rajya Sabha on February 9 informed that over 69,000 cases are pending at the Supreme Court, while over 59 lakh cases are pending in the country's 25 high courts.

Law Minister Kiren Rijiju claimed in a written reply, using information from the Supreme Court's website, that 69,511 cases were pending in the highest court as of February 1.

"There are 59,87,477 cases pending in the high courts across the country as per the information available on National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) on February 1, 2023," he said. 

Of these, 10.30 lakh cases were pending at the Allahabad High Court, the country's largest high court. The Sikkim High Court has the fewest cases (171).

Rijiju stated that the government has made many measures to create a "suitable environment" for the Judiciary to handle matters quickly.

India's subordinate courts dispose of cases in an average of 2,184 days, High Courts in an average of 1,128 days, and the Supreme Court in an average of 1,095 days. This results in a total case life cycle of 12+ years in India.

In India, there are now about 4.7 crore lawsuits pending in various courts. Nearly 1.8 lakh of them have been outstanding for more than 30 years, with 87.4% of them in lower courts and 12.4% in the high courts., according to the reports.

With a view to digitizing the courts, the Supreme Court launched the E-Committee way back in 2004, which implemented two phases of the e-Courts Project.

The introduction of the government’s Digital India initiative, along with the low cost internet data access across the country now sees over 65.8 crore active users. The Indian digital stack has led to remarkable innovation across e-governance aspects of public services delivery, as well as private sector innovation using it. Hence the digital judicial system need not be slowed down, for worries of privacy, cyber security, justice seeker protection.