Measure and Publish Court Performance

India cannot improve its courts effectively unless it can clearly see where cases are getting delayed and why.

Regular publication of court performance can make the justice system more transparent, make persistent delays visible, and create greater accountability for improving performance.

A court may have too few judges, too many old cases, repeated adjournments, slow case disposal, staff shortages, or other bottlenecks. Without consistent performance information, these problems can remain hidden until the backlog becomes severe.

India already publishes substantial court data through systems such as the National Judicial Data Grid. The next step should be to turn that data into simple, standardized measures that citizens, court administrators, and policymakers can easily understand and use to improve performance.

A problem becomes much harder to ignore when everyone can see it.

India should create a standard Court Performance Dashboard for every district court, High Court, and the Supreme Court.

The dashboard should show simple measures such as the number of cases filed and resolved, total pending cases, age of pending cases, average resolution time, clearance rate, judicial vacancies, and frequency of adjournments.

The information should allow comparisons over time, so that people can see whether a court’s backlog is improving or getting worse. Courts with unusually old cases or growing backlogs should be automatically identified for review and additional support.

Performance information should also help courts identify the causes of delay—whether they arise from insufficient judges or staff, repeated adjournments, infrastructure constraints, administrative problems, or other bottlenecks—and establish corrective actions where performance is consistently falling behind.

The purpose should not be to create simplistic rankings of individual judges. Different judges handle different types and levels of case complexity. Performance data should primarily be used to identify problems in the system, improve court management, and determine where additional judges, staff, technology, or infrastructure are needed.

At the same time, transparency should create accountability. Courts should be expected to examine persistent delays, explain significant deviations from established time standards, and demonstrate what is being done to improve performance.

The information should be publicly available in simple language so that citizens can see how well the justice system serving their area is functioning.

The United States federal judiciary provides a useful example. It regularly publishes detailed statistics on court caseloads, filings, terminations, pending cases, and the time cases take to move through the system. It also publishes reports identifying civil matters that have remained pending beyond specified periods.

India already has an important foundation through the National Judicial Data Grid, which provides public information on pending and disposed cases and allows cases to be examined by age and other measures. This means India does not need to build a performance system from scratch—it can strengthen what already exists and make accountability much clearer.

Publishing standardized performance information would allow governments and courts to identify where the system is falling behind and direct resources toward the actual bottlenecks.

Transparency also changes the management of delay. When persistent backlogs and unusually old cases are visible, they can be identified, investigated, and addressed rather than gradually becoming accepted as normal.

The purpose of measuring courts is not to punish judges. It is to find where justice is getting stuck, create accountability for improving it—and fix it.