The government must ease off on litigation to reduce the judiciary’s burden and help the economy

This translates to barely 21 judges per million people, far below the Law Commission’s recommended 50 and well short of the US (107) and UK (51).

Vacancies hover around 30% in many high courts and case disposal rates remain sluggish, averaging 1,350 cases per judge annually, versus over 2,000 in OECD jurisdictions.

Each adjournment adds several months to case duration: over 18 million cases are more than three years old and 5 million exceed a decade.

Judicial inefficiency has thus become both a governance and economic problem, conservatively estimated by Niti Aayog to shave 1.5% off GDP annually through delayed contract enforcement, locked capital and investor uncertainty.

Behind this inefficiency lies an even deeper structural distortion: the state itself. The Union government, public sector undertakings (PSUs), state governments, state PSUs and local bodies together account for nearly half of all litigation nationwide.

At the Union level, according to Legal Information Management and Briefing System (LIMBS), the finance ministry alone is party to nearly 200,000 pending cases, 98,544 before tribunals, 83,552 in high courts and 12,589 in the Supreme Court, representing roughly 13% of the top court’s burden.

Tax and revenue disputes dominate, but the government’s litigation footprint extends across civil contracts, land acquisition and service matters.

Although monetary thresholds for appeals were raised in 2022 (to ₹1 crore for high courts and ₹2 crore for the Supreme Court), pendency reduction has been marginal, reflecting a culture of litigation as bureaucratic insurance rather than legal necessity.

This culture stems from several institutionalized incentives that make ‘default litigation’ the path of least resistance.

Audit and vigilance frameworks indirectly treat unappealed losses as negligence; accounting codes of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) require every audit objection to be ‘settled’ or ‘explained,’ and an appeal offers safe harbour from being questioned, while a liberal appellate framework allows virtually automatic filing.

Despite calls for a binding national litigation policy, successive governments have balked.

Instead, we now have a ‘Directive for Efficient and Effective Management of Litigation’ (April 2025), which introduces nodal officers, legal cells and MIS dashboards, but lacks statutory teeth, performance-linked disincentives or real-time data integrity.

LIMBS itself remains under-updated and fails to track reasons for appeal.

Here is a five-point agenda for inclusion in a national litigation policy. First, India must move away from its open-ended appeal culture and adopt a ‘leave-to-litigate’ system that acts as a regulatory filter. Departments should not be permitted to file more than one automatic appeal.

Any second or higher appeal must obtain prior clearance from an empowered group of secretaries (EGoS) chaired by the attorney general that should apply a three-factor test of (a) public interest, or whether the case impacts governance or citizens beyond the immediate dispute; (b) legal novelty, or whether it raises a new or unsettled question of law; and (c) its probability of success, or whether an appeal has reasonable merit.

All clearances, refusals and reasons for decisions should be published quarterly to promote transparency and accountability, making higher litigation a privilege of merit rather than routine practice.

Second, litigation must be treated as an information system. A new national legal information grid should integrate existing platforms such as LIMBS, the National Judicial Datagrid, e-courts, digital platforms, etc, to enable real-time tracking of every case involving a government entity.

Reasons for appeal, stages of proceedings, adjournments, costs incurred and success rates should be visible. AI-based analytics could identify departments that repeatedly lose on the same issue, generate predictive ‘win-loss’ probabilities and flag cases ripe for settlement.


Third, to reduce unnecessary appeals driven by audit or vigilance fear, we need a clear pre-EGoS litigation decision protocol. Only after a ministry’s legal advisor advises litigation should it be sent to the EGoS.

Officers who support decisions in writing, with the legal merit, financial implications, public interest and success likelihood of a case duly noted, should receive safe-harbour protection if it is vetted by the legal advisor.

Fourth, every ministry and PSU must have an annual litigation budget cap. Legal spending should be treated as a burden.
If a department exceeds its cap or loses a case where an appeal was discouraged, expenses should be charged to its own account head.

Conversely, ministries that achieve measurable reductions in pendency or successful settlements could get incentives.


Fifth, transparency deters wasteful litigation. The law ministry should set up a public litigation dashboard, a citizen-friendly version of LIMBS, covering every ministry and department.

It should publish quarterly data on pending cases, average case duration and adjournment frequency, apart from the success rate and costs. It should be easy for the public to access and understand.

The state should stop being the country’s most compulsive litigant. Justice will be more efficient once the government learns to rest its case.

The author writes on macroeconomic and geopolitical issues.