GS Paper: GS2-09.Appointment to various Constitutional posts; Constitutional Bodies(powers, functions and responsibilities); Statutory, Regulatory and Quasi-judicial bodies

Mentor’s Comment

The Supreme Court’s six-week summer break (June 1 to July 12) coincides with a record 5.39 crore pending cases across Indian courts, the Supreme Court’s heaviest load in over 30 years. This has sharpened the debate on whether collective, en masse judicial recess is defensible when nearly three in four prisoners in India are undertrials awaiting the completion of their own trials.

What does the coexistence of a record case backlog and a mass judicial vacation reveal about court functioning in India?

1. Scale of pendency: More than 5.39 crore cases were pending in Indian courts as of the last day of 2025.
2. Distribution of the backlog: District courts held over 4.76 crore cases, High Courts held 63.6 lakh cases, and the Supreme Court held more than 92,000 cases, its heaviest load in over 30 years.
3. Undertrial burden: Roughly three in four prisoners in India are undertrials. They are unconvicted and presumed innocent, yet some serve longer in custody than the sentence they would have received had they pleaded guilty.
4. Institutional asymmetry: Hospitals, police stations, markets, and government offices continue functioning through individual staff leave. The Supreme Court and High Courts instead shut down collectively for six weeks.
5. Clearance timeline: A government study calculated that clearing the existing backlog at the present pace would take three centuries.

Why does an individual judge’s right to rest not justify the institution’s collective closure?

1. Workload reality: Indian judges are among the most overworked in the world. The recess period is when reserved judgments finally get written.
2. Continuity is achievable: Last year the Chief Justice of India and the four senior-most judges worked through the first week of the break.
3. The actual design flaw: The problem is not that judges rest. It is that almost all of them rest together, so the institution goes quiet for six-plus weeks every year.
4. Colonial origin: The current calendar traces to a practice built for English judges. They withdrew to cooler climates during the Indian summer and took long Christmas holidays in winter.

Why did the 2024 renaming of the summer vacation fail to reduce the backlog?

1. Rebranding without substance: In 2024, the Supreme Court renamed the “summer vacation” as “partial court working days.”
2. No change in working days: The actual number of sitting days remained at approximately 190 days a year.
3. Litigant impact unaddressed: A litigant whose case is stalled is unaffected by the label given to the recess. What matters is whether the matter is heard and disposed of.

What administrative reform has been repeatedly recommended to keep courts continuously functional, and why has it not been adopted?

1. Staggering as the core proposal: The judiciary’s own watchdogs have long recommended not abolishing judicial rest but staggering it, rotating leave so Benches remain full.
2. Parliamentary recommendation: A 2023 parliamentary standing committee objected to “the entire court going on vacation en masse” and proposed rotating leave to keep courts running continuously.
3. Earlier precedent: The Law Commission of India and the Justice Malimath Committee made the same recommendation earlier. They were not opposing the courts; they were trying to protect them from themselves.
4. Institutional analogy: A hospital does not empty its wards because doctors are owed time off. It builds a roster instead.
5. Status: Despite three separate recommending bodies, this reform remains unimplemented.

Is the crisis in India’s courts one of vacations or of vacancies? 

1. The standard objection: Critics argue that vacations are a sideshow and the real disease is judicial vacancies, not recess.
2. Vacancy scale: Up to a third of High Court seats lie vacant.
3. The rebuttal: A Bench already running at half strength is thinned further for six weeks every summer. This makes the recess a stronger case against itself, not a defence of it.
4. Distinct accountability: Filling vacancies depends on the government and the collegium, and will take years to resolve.
5. Distinct reform lever: The vacation calendar is the judiciary’s own to fix. It needs only institutional will, not external permission.

Beyond staggering leave, how can India reduce the flow of disputes into its courts?

1. Symptom versus deeper fix: Staggering leave treats only the symptom. Courts were never meant to be the first stop for every dispute, only the last.
2. Lok Adalat performance: Lok Adalats settled more than 2.59 crore cases in a single national sitting last December, and over 23.5 crore cases in three years.
3. Mediation Act, 2023: This Act nudges parties to attempt settlement before approaching a court.
4. Arbitration: Arbitration can remove commercial disputes entirely from judges’ hands. This route remains badly underused.
5. Retired judges as an untapped resource: India has a reservoir of retired judges who step down at 62 or 65, still in full command of their expertise. Many already head quasi-judicial bodies and tribunals.
6. Proposed use: A dedicated corps of former judges, freed from daily dockets, could identify where cases pile up, set public disposal targets, and report progress openly.

Conclusion

Collective judicial recess, an inherited colonial practice, is defensible for individual judges but indefensible as an institutional design when 5.39 crore cases and undertrial prisoners are held hostage to it. Cosmetic fixes such as renaming the vacation do not alter the actual working calendar. Staggering leave to keep Benches continuously functional is a reform within the judiciary’s own control, unlike the filling of vacancies, which depends on the executive and the collegium. The unresolved question is whether the judiciary will exercise this available reform, or continue mistaking cosmetic change for structural correction.