CAG Must Audit India's Judiciary Before the Crisis Gets Worse

The crisis in India's judiciary has long ceased to be merely a question of pending cases and delayed hearings. It has emerged as one of the country's largest hidden economic liabilities, an important contributor to governance failures, and perhaps the most under-examined institutional challenge confronting the Republic. With more than five crore pending cases, severe shortages of judges, mounting undertrial populations, rising litigation costs, and declining confidence in contract enforcement, delays across the judiciary impose enormous social, economic, and constitutional costs upon society. The consequences extend far beyond courtrooms, affecting investment, business confidence, prison administration, governance, social justice, and public trust in institutions.

This deep dive report argues that a carefully designed performance audit of judicial administration by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), without intruding into judicial decision-making, could represent one of the most significant accountability exercises in contemporary India. The larger question, however, is whether the CAG itself retains the institutional appetite to enter what may be the last great unaudited domain of governance. India today may be the world's largest democracy, but it is increasingly becoming one of the world's largest waiting rooms. Citizens wait for bail, businesses wait for contract enforcement, governments wait for land acquisition disputes to conclude, accident victims wait for compensation, families wait for inheritance disputes to end, and undertrial prisoners wait for trials that often take longer than the sentences eventually awarded. Justice delayed has gradually ceased to shock the nation because delay itself has become institutionalised.

The scale of the crisis is now too large to be dismissed as routine pendency. According to the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG), district and subordinate courts alone carry nearly 4.96 crore pending cases, of which about 3.84 crore are criminal and 1.13 crore are civil. The Supreme Court's own NJDG shows more than 93,000 pending cases before the apex court. A Rajya Sabha reply of April 2026, relying on NJDG data as on 9 March 2026, placed pendency at 64.01 lakh cases in High Courts and 4.95 crore cases in subordinate courts. Taken together, India is not facing a backlog; it is facing a judicial avalanche. The human cost is even more disturbing. NCRB's Prison Statistics India 2022 showed that 4,34,302 of India's 5,73,220 prisoners were undertrials, accounting for 75.8 per cent of the prison population, while prisons operated at 131.4 per cent occupancy.

Several High Courts function with substantial judicial vacancies, while trial courts struggle with shortages of judges, prosecutors, court staff, and infrastructure. India continues to have one of the lowest judge-to-population ratios among major democracies. The Law Commission had recommended decades ago that the country should move toward fifty judges per million population, yet actual availability remains significantly lower. The judiciary's own leadership has repeatedly acknowledged the gravity of the problem. Former CJI N. V. Ramana bluntly described governments as the "biggest litigants", accounting for nearly 50 per cent of pending cases, and linked the "docket explosion" to the non-performance of various wings of the executive and legislature. Former CJI Sanjiv Khanna, immediately after assuming office, identified reduction of case backlogs, affordable access to litigation, and simplification of complex legal procedures as core priorities.

The hidden economic costs of a slow judiciary rarely appear in government accounts. National income statistics do not capture the value of investments postponed because of litigation. Budget documents do not estimate the costs arising from delayed land acquisition, unresolved tax disputes, and other cases where the government is the largest litigant. Judicial delay has evolved into a serious developmental issue. Economic growth suffers when contracts cannot be enforced within reasonable timeframes. Investors demand higher risk premiums. Commercial disputes outlive business cycles. Infrastructure projects remain stalled for years. Banks struggle to recover dues. Governments accumulate contingent liabilities arising from unresolved litigation. In effect, India has accumulated not merely a fiscal deficit but a growing justice deficit. This report argues that a CAG audit of judicial administration, if designed with respect for judicial independence, could be a transformative tool to address this crisis. However, the capacity and political will of the CAG to undertake this challenge remain in question.