Higher Court or Supreme Court?

Rukmini Shrinivasan
14 December 2012, 07:04 PM IST

There's some great new data on the Supreme Court in a research paper that I wrote about today. Aside from the important issue of the Delhi/ Punjab bias in cases that make it to the SC, and the geographical and wealth barriers in accessing the SC that this implies, there were several other nuggets of data that taken together raised the question: what kind of court do we want our Supreme Court to be?

The SC's workload has exploded. Legal researcher Nick Robinson finds that between 2000 and 2010 the number of new admission matters that were filed with the SC nearly doubled from 24,747 to 48,677. Meanwhile, the number of regular hearing matters admitted by the Court also nearly doubled from 4,507 to 8,824. Consequently, the Court's backlog has jumped: in 2004, 7% of regular hearing matters had been pending for more than five years. In 2011, it was 17% of regular hearing matters.

As I pointed out in the piece, the bulk of these cases were appeals: PILs constitute less 1 per cent of the SC's workload. Moreover, five-judge benches – which hear substantial questions of constitutional law – have become a rarity. In the 1960's, says Robinson, the Supreme Court decided over 100 five-judge benches a year. "With ever-increasing pendency, this declined to just 6.4 five-judge benches a year from 2005 to 2009. A large backlog of constitution benches has resulted, and on average it now takes the Court longer to hear a constitution bench than any other type of matter," Robinson's paper says.

I love data but I know little about jurisprudence, so the question I raise will necessarily be very basic. Is this what we want our Supreme Court to be, a place that is more the third and last layer of a three-tier system, than the first and only place where our Constitution – and the idea of India – evolves? Take a look at the amazing wealth of data in this report and let me know what you think.