The Judiciary's Layered Structure

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India runs a single integrated judiciary. This distinguishes it sharply from federations such as the United States or Australia, where federal and state court systems run in parallel with their own hierarchies. In India there is one pyramid: district and subordinate courts at the base, a High Court for each state or group of states in the middle, and the Supreme Court of India at the apex. A single case can, in principle, travel the whole way up, and the same courts apply both central and state law. The design was deliberate, adopted by the Constituent Assembly to hold a newly independent and highly diverse country together under one legal order.

At the base sit the district courts, established in each district and headed by a District Judge on the civil side and a Sessions Judge on the criminal side, frequently the same person holding both designations. Below and alongside them are courts of civil judges, judicial magistrates and metropolitan magistrates in the larger cities. This is where almost all litigation in India actually happens and where almost all of it ends. Appointments to these courts are made by the state governments in consultation with the High Court, and entry is generally through competitive judicial service examinations, which makes the subordinate judiciary a career service in a way the higher courts are not.

The High Courts and the Supreme Court

The High Courts are the constitutional courts of the states, and several of them are older than the Republic. The High Courts at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were established in 1862 under the Indian High Courts Act of 1861, and the Allahabad High Court followed in 1866. There are more than twenty High Courts, some with jurisdiction over more than one state or union territory, and many sit in benches at more than one location. A High Court supervises all courts within its jurisdiction, hears appeals from them, and exercises a power of considerable importance: under Article 226 of the Constitution it may issue writs, including habeas corpus, mandamus and certiorari, not only for the enforcement of fundamental rights but for any other purpose, which gives it a broader writ jurisdiction than the Supreme Court has under Article 32.

The Supreme Court of India was inaugurated in January 1950, taking over from the Federal Court established under the Government of India Act of 1935 and, for a period, from the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London. It sits in New Delhi. Its jurisdiction has several strands: original jurisdiction in disputes between the Union and states or between states; writ jurisdiction under Article 32 for the enforcement of fundamental rights, which Ambedkar described in the Constituent Assembly as the heart of the Constitution; appellate jurisdiction in civil, criminal and constitutional matters; and a very wide discretionary power under Article 136 to grant special leave to appeal from almost any court or tribunal in India. That last power is why the Supreme Court hears a far larger volume of cases than most apex courts, sitting usually in benches of two or three judges, with larger constitution benches of five or more convened for substantial questions of constitutional interpretation.

How judges reach the higher courts is one of the most contested questions in Indian public law. The Constitution's text speaks of appointment by the President in consultation with the Chief Justice of India and others. Through a series of judgments in 1981, 1993 and 1998, generally referred to as the Judges Cases, the Supreme Court reinterpreted that consultation to mean that a collegium of senior judges effectively controls appointments and transfers to the High Courts and Supreme Court. Parliament attempted to replace this with a National Judicial Appointments Commission through a constitutional amendment in 2014, and the Supreme Court struck the amendment down in 2015 as violating the independence of the judiciary. The collegium system therefore stands, and criticism of it, on grounds of opacity and lack of accountability, comes from across the political spectrum, including from within the judiciary. There is no settled consensus on what should replace it.

Public interest litigation, delay, and the alternatives

The most distinctive Indian innovation is public interest litigation, which developed from the late 1970s and 1980s in the aftermath of the Emergency of 1975 to 1977, associated with judges including P. N. Bhagwati and V. R. Krishna Iyer. The courts relaxed the traditional requirement that only an injured party may sue, allowing any public spirited person to bring a matter on behalf of those unable to approach the court themselves, and in some instances treating a letter or a newspaper report as a petition. This opened the courts to cases about prison conditions, bonded labour, environmental damage and access to food, and produced a body of jurisprudence reading rights to livelihood, health, education and a clean environment into the right to life under Article 21. Supporters see this as the court giving practical content to constitutional promises. Critics argue it has drawn judges into policy and administration for which they have neither the expertise nor the democratic mandate, and that it has contributed to the court's own overload.

Delay is the system's defining practical problem. Tens of millions of cases are pending across the Indian courts at any time, the great majority of them in the subordinate judiciary, and cases running for a decade or more are not unusual. The causes are structural rather than mysterious: judge to population ratios well below what successive commissions have recommended, large numbers of sanctioned posts left vacant, procedural rules that permit repeated adjournments, and government litigation, since the state and its agencies are the largest single category of litigant.

Responses have included specialised tribunals for tax, company law, environment and services matters, notably the National Green Tribunal established in 2010; fast track courts for particular offence categories; a statutory push for mediation and for arbitration in commercial disputes; and the eCourts programme, which has digitised case records, introduced electronic filing, and, since the pandemic period, made virtual hearings routine. The Supreme Court now livestreams constitution bench proceedings, which is a genuine advance in transparency. None of these has yet resolved the backlog. For most litigants the meaningful experience of Indian justice is not a constitutional judgment reported in the newspapers but a district court file that has been listed and adjourned many times, and any assessment of the institution has to hold both realities at once.

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