Beyond Pendency: Counting Cases Correctly

by Pavithra Manivannan, Siddarth Raman and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah.

The discourse on Indian judicial reform is dominated by questions of pendency and the workload of courts. However, official sources of caseload estimates in India have been found to be deficient in terms of both the methodology used, and the quality of underlying data (Jain and Reddy, 2025; Damle and Anand 2020). This leads to miscalculation of the caseload of courts and renders it unamenable for comparison across courts. In this article, we propose a new approach for estimating the caseload at Indian courts. We apply this to analyse the caseload at the Original Side of the Bombay High Court, which accounts for 35% of the total caseload of the Court. Our analysis yields three main findings. First, the caseload at the Original Side of the Bombay High Court (the Court) is being overcounted by 66%. Second, the caseload composition of the Court has remained largely stable over the 7-year period of our study with two case-types, namely, inheritance cases, and writ petitions filed against the government, accounting for half the cases filed in the Court. Third, suits as a case-type generates the most number of sub or interim cases.

In India, there are two official sources that publish information on caseloads - the annual report of the Supreme Court and the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG). Apart from the quality of the data, there are two specific problems with the estimation methodology used by these sources. First, as a case progresses in a court of law, it generates multiple sub-cases. For instance, if a case is filed as a "Suit" for recovery of money, several interlocutory applications may be filed through which the main money suit (the 'main case') progresses. Such sub-cases could range from simple applications seeking the addition of a new party to the proceedings to an interim injunction seeking a stay on the transfer of assets of the respondent. Currently, the NJDG counts such sub-cases as distinct cases. This leads to overestimation of the caseload, inflating pendency and disposal rates. This is because the hearings for sub-cases are held as part of the main case proceedings. Further, a reading of the orders of cases suggests that more often than not, the final disposal order is common for both the main case and its sub-cases. Second, the taxonomy for case-type categorisation is inconsistent across official sources. The Bombay High Court's website lists 142 case-types on its Original Side. On the other hand, the NJDG reports only 19 case-types for the Original Side of the Bombay High Court. This includes an 'Original' and an 'Other' category, which provides little to no information on the case-type filed in the court. Further, the annual report of the Supreme Court has an altogether different classification system, which cannot be readily mapped to the other two official sources. It has a large bucket under 'Other' which does not have a clear definition. Our approach attempts to address these problems.

We count sub-cases as part of its corresponding main case. That is, we adopt the 'family of cases' as the unit of analysis for caseload estimation. This involves collapsing the 142 case-types on the Original Side of the Court into 17 main case-types and two sub case-types, based on their subject. For example, of the 142 case-types, 80 case-types are in the nature of sub-cases such as "Interim Applications", "Leave Petitions", "Chamber Order Lodging" and "Notice of Motion". We classify these as "Interim Applications" and count these as sub-cases. Similarly, "Arbitration Petitions" and "Arbitration Applications" are categorised as "Arbitration cases". This standardisation of case-types makes the caseload estimation exercise scalable and amenable to comparison across similar courts. The list of the 142 case-types and the classification assigned by us can be accessed here.

Data and Methodology

We collect the life-cycle data of 2,36,953 cases filed at the Original Side of the Court between the period January 2017 to December 2024 (Study Period). The Bombay High Court exercises original jurisdiction or jurisdiction over first time civil cases, and appellate jurisdiction or jurisdiction over cases that come before it as appeals from lower courts. We source the information on the life-cycle of cases filed at the Court's original jurisdiction from its website, and it is comprehensive to the extent the Court has made the data available.

As on the date of our data collection exercise (February 2025), the Court's website reported 1,43,514 (61%) cases as disposed of and 93,254 (39%) cases as pending. If the status of a case was unknown or marked as transferred, we classify it into the 'Other' category (185 cases).

We tag each case in our dataset as a main case or a sub-case. Next, we create a family of cases using the CNR number assigned by the Court as the unique identifier. This family of cases becomes our unit of analysis. Finally, each family of case is classified into one of the 17 case types.

Finding 1: Official sources overestimate caseload

The Court's website shows that about 2.5 lakh cases are filed before its Original Side during our Study Period. That is, on an average, about 30,000 cases are filed every year. However, we find that about 40% of these cases are sub-cases (Table 1 below). Viewed in this light, the 30,000 new cases per year can be understood as an overestimate. The annual average of new main cases filed before the Original Side of the Court is about 18,000, almost half of the original estimate.

Table 1: No. of filings

Nature	Count	Average per-year	% of total
Main cases	1,41,608	17,850	60
Sub-cases	95,435	11,769	40
Total	2,36,953	29,619	100

Finding 2: Six case-types dominate caseload

On applying our categorisation framework, we find that six case-types contribute to about 95% of the caseload at the Original Side of the Court (Table 2). In that, Inheritance cases and Writ petitions constitute half the caseload. We also find that the share of case filings across years for these categories do not vary significantly.

Table 2: No. of filings per case-type

Case Category	Count	% of Total
Writs	36,145	25.5
Inheritance and Succession cases	32,979	23.3
Execution cases	19,779	14.0
Tax cases	19,665	13.9
Arbitration cases	16,529	11.7
Suits	8,652	6.1
Other	7,859	5.6
Total	1,41,608	100.0

Finding 3: Suits generate the most sub-cases

We take a closer look at the number of sub-cases per main case in Table 4 for the top six case-types. We find that, while Inheritance cases and Writ petitions are the highest contributor to the caseload of the Court, Suits that is at the bottom of Table 2, has the highest number of sub-cases per main case. 50% of Suits have upto two sub-cases, suggesting that on a per-case basis, Suits may generate more workload for judges compared to Writ petitions and Inheritance cases.

Table 3: Sub-cases per case-type

Case category	Sub-cases per main case (in %)
	0	1-2	3-5	6-10	>10
Writs	86	13	1	0	0
Inheritance and Succession cases	77	21	2	0	0
Execution cases	86	13	1	0	0
Tax cases	84	16	0	0	0
Arbitration cases	84	15	1	0	0
Suits	31	52	14	3	0

Conclusion

Our finding that the caseload of the Bombay High Court is overestimated by about 66% likely means other courts across India are overreporting caseloads as well. When official sources like the NJDG count sub-cases as distinct new filings, it exaggerates the problem of pendency. This prompts the policymakers to focus on solutions like increasing the number of judges, and creating more courts or courtrooms. Such a sole focus on this metric not only neglects the underlying data quality issues leading to inefficient resource allocation but also ignores the unique challenges that each type of case filed in the court face.

Measures of the economy such as GDP, inflation, and employment rate, took decades to be built and continue to be challenged and improved, by researchers and policy-makers alike. Similar sound systems for the measurement of court metrics, of which caseload is only one part, need to be developed. Such systems are imperative for any meaningful discussion on court reform.

References

Chitrakshi Jain and Prashant Reddy T. Tareekh Pe Justice: Reforms for India's District Courts. Simon and Schuster India, 2025.

Devendra Damle and Tushar Anand. Problems with the e-Courts data. NIPFP WP Series, 314, 2020.

Mugdha Mohapatra, Siddarth Raman and Susan Thomas. Get them to the court on time: bumps in the road to justice. The Leap Blog, 2025.

The authors are researchers at XKDR Forum, Bombay.

Do court vacations matter: evidence from the Bombay High Court

by Tushar Anand, Pavithra Manivannan, and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah.

Introduction

Court vacations are often invoked as a problematic feature of the Indian judiciary. The discourse on this includes blaming court vacations for case delays, petitions to reduce the length of court vacations, and substituting them with staggered leave for judges. This discourse is characterised by the classic divide that cuts across most Indian discourse on court reforms. Lawyers and judges emphasize the importance of court vacations for overall judge productivity. Often, they perceive the criticism of court vacations as being politically motivated or as an attack on judicial integrity. Other stakeholders underscore the problems of delays and pendency, and compare the courts' calendar with that of other public organisations. In the event, neither side is able to support their argument by demonstrating the extent of delays attributable to court vacations. The puzzle on how much do court vacations actually affect case durations and disposal continues to remain unanswered. This article presents some first estimates on the impact of court vacations on these outputs.

During the vacation period, courts function with minimal capacity. This allows us to compare the functioning of a court during its vacation and non-vacation periods. Using a dataset of civil and commercial cases filed over about six years at the Bombay High Court, we evaluate the extent to which vacations at the court affected its productivity, measured in terms of case disposal rates and the lifecycle of cases.

Unsurprisingly, we find that there is a significant drop in the daily number of cases filed and disposed by the Bombay High Court during vacations, compared to the non-vacation periods of the year. However, this gap shrinks over time. Second, the fact that a case is filed during the vacation period affects its initial phases, but does not affect the duration within which it will get disposed of. In sum, while court vacations affect the initial phase of a case schedule, dispensing with court vacations will not make a significant difference to the disposal rates or the disposal duration of cases at the Bombay High Court.

Court vacations

Indian courts, such as the supreme court, high courts and district courts, and most tribunals, are scheduled to take three vacations - summer, festive, winter - each year. The summer vacation lasts for a little more than a month and the festive and winter vacations last for a little more than week. While the concept of court vacations is traceable to the colonial origins of the Indian judicial system, they eventually became a part of the rules governing the functioning of the Supreme Court and High Courts. The practice is not unique to India and is followed in several developed countries, such as the United States, Australia and Singapore.

During vacations, Indian courts function with vacation benches of judges to hear urgent matters that come up during this time, and a lower staff at the court registry. A comparison of the sitting list of judges for the Bombay High Court shows that, on a non-vacation day, 27 courtrooms are functional. On the other hand, on vacation days, not more than four courtrooms are functional. A reduced number of judges will likely affect the scheduling and eventual disposal of cases filed during vacations. A reduced registry capacity will likely affect the filing of new cases and scheduling of proceedings for existing cases. To be sure, court vacations affect not only the working hours of courts, but also the entire ecosystem around it. For instance, it is generally hard to find lawyers to appear for litigants before vacation benches during this time, further slowing down proceedings. Since these changes are endogeneous to court vacations, it is hard to isolate the impact of lower judges from that of the absence of lawyers willing to work during the vacation period, on the lifecycle of a case. Finally, what cases are construed as 'urgent' varies across judges' interpretation of urgency.

In this institutional setting, we ask the following questions to evaluate the impact of court vacations on overall case durations at the Bombay High Court:

1. Do case filings and disposals drop during vacation periods?
2. Do cases filed during court vacations take longer to get their first hearing?
3. Do cases filed during court vacations take longer to get disposed of?

Data and Methodology

We collect and analyse the data of cases involving all civil suits and commercial suits, which were filed at the Bombay High Court during the seven year period from January 2017 to December 2023 (Study Period). For each of these cases, our dataset captures information on the entire life-cycle of the case available on the respective courts' websites. This includes the date of filing, the dates on which hearings were conducted, and the date of disposal. Table 1 shows the total number of cases in our dataset and their status, that is, whether the cases were pending or disposed, at the time of data collection. We then count the number of days on which these courts were on vacation during our Study Period, using the vacation dates published on their websites. On an average, the Bombay High Court has 52 days of vacation per year and the average number of working days is 235.

Table 1: Data description

Cases
Disposed	1379
Pending	2529
Total	3908

One caveat. Our results account for select case-types (civil suits and commercial suits), as our dataset comprises such cases. Given that criminal cases or writ petitions, particularly those pertaining to questions of liberty or reliefs pre-empting State actions, have a higher element of urgency, it is possible that the findings for these case types will differ from our findings for civil and commercial cases.

Impact of court vacations on case filing and disposal

We begin by comparing the daily average number of cases filed and disposed before the Bombay High Court during the vacation and non-vacation period (Table 2). At the Bombay High Court, on an average, the number of cases filed during non-vacation days is thrice the number of cases filed during vacation days. Further, the Bombay High Court is able to dispose four times the number of cases on non-vacation days, compared to the vacation days.

Table 2: Average number of cases filed and disposed per day

	Vacation days	Non-vacation days
Cases filed	0.67	2.23
Cases disposed of	0.21	0.88

We examine whether the difference between the number of cases filed during vacation and non-vacation periods or between the number of cases disposed of during these two periods, is statistically significant. The standard t-test and z-test used for determining statistical significance assume a normal distribution of the underlying data. However, our data is not amenable to this test for two reasons. One, the number of observed cases in non-vacation period is five times than that in the vacation period. Second, the distribution of the per day number of cases filed and disposed of is right-biased, with a long tail. We used a two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to confirm that the two samples come from different distributions. In the absence of the standard tests (t-test and z-test), we use a bootstrapped sampling method to estimate the statistical significance of the difference in means of the two sets (vacation and non-vacation) of our data. This method allows us to create a normal distribution of the data by repeatedly drawing random samples from each of the two sets. This approach shows that the difference in means for the number of cases filed and disposed during vacation and non-vacation days is statistically significant at the five percent level.

At first glance, these findings might suggest that had the court not been on vacation, case disposals would have increased by a factor of four. However, this disposal rate is likely not linear. For instance, a quarter-wise analysis of cases filed and disposed of shows that these differences reduce (Table 3). That is, the difference in the number of filings and disposals in Quarters 2 and 4 that are affected by vacation days (Apr-Jun and Oct-Dec) and Quarters 1 and 3 that are not affected by vacation days (Jan-Mar and Jul-Sep), are much smaller.

Table 3: Quarter-wise average of cases filed and disposed

	Q1	Q2*	Q3	Q4*
Cases filed	162.57	128.29	134.86	132.58
Cases disposed of	51.29	38.71	58.43	46.00

^{*Denotes quarters affected by vacation days.}

Impact of vacations on case timelines

The analysis in the previous section would reflect the impact of court vacation on the overall productivity of the court. However, what is the impact of court vacations for an individual litigant? In this section, we examine whether the timelines for important milestones in a case vary for a litigant who filed her case during the vacation period, compared to a litigant who filed her case during the non-vacation days.

We estimate the time taken for cases to be scheduled for its first hearing and time taken for them to be disposed of. These estimations are made using the survival analysis approach used by Manivannan et al, 2023. This approach is a useful measure of individual case life cycles. It shows the likelihood of a case awaiting an important milestone, such as a first hearing or disposal, at different points in time.

Table 4: Probability of first hearing

	Vacation days	Non-vacation days
1 month	6.47%	7.24%
3 months	25.10%	23.35%
6 months	49.39%	47.20%

Table 4 shows the probability of a case getting its first hearing within one month, three months and six months of filing. The table compares these probabilities for cases filed during vacation days and non-vacation days. The probability of a case filed during the non-vacation period getting its first hearing within one month of filing is only slightly higher than the corresponding probability of a case filed during the non-vacation period. As time progresses, this difference disappears. In fact, after the first month of filing, cases filed during the vacation period have a marginally higher probability of getting their first hearing than cases filed during the non-vacation period. In sum, our analysis suggests that the "vacation effect" on case scheduling persists for not more than a month.

Similarly, we estimate the probability of a case getting disposed of within one to two years of its filing. Table 5 compares these probabilities for cases filed during vacation days and non-vacation days. At the Bombay High Court, there is about 5-6% higher disposal probability for cases filed during the non-vacation days. Overall, the "vacation effect" is marginal and temporary, and does not seem to affect the case duration for a litigant.

Table 5: Probability of disposal

	Cases filed on
	Vacation days	Non-vacation days
6 months	6.95%	11.03%
1 year	11.62%	17.95%
2 years	22.59%	27.11%

Conclusion

Our analysis provides the first estimates on the impact of Indian court vacations on some measurable elements of a court's functioning. Historical data from the Bombay High Court for civil and commercial cases shows that court vacations have a statistically significant impact on the number of cases filed and disposed of on a daily basis. While this finding is perhaps unsurprising, these differences disappear over time. Further, they do not substantially affect the overall duration of the case, even as they have a small effect on the initial phases of cases filed during court vacations.

A key limitation of our analysis is that it does not account for the impact, if any, of court vacations on a judge at the individual level. That is, it does not capture the possible intangible productivity gains that accrue from a holiday. It is possible, for instance, that when a judge goes on a vacation, she writes more judgements, reads more jurisprudence or returns with boosted productivity. The data available in the public domain does not allow us to measure these impacts on judge productivity. Besides, if there were such impacts on a judge, they are not a powerful explanation for a court vacation where all the judges go on vacation simultaneously. These benefits would accrue even where judges take leave as per their own convenience during the calendar year. Therefore, while measuring such impacts is important for its own sake, it does not add to the vacation-related discourse which our analysis speaks to.

Finally, several scholars have started adopting the empirical approach in evaluating Indian courts and tribunals, using a variety of tools ranging from simple summary statistics to more advanced analyses grounded in statistics, and using the tools of natural language processing and artificial intelligence. We provide yet another demonstration that questions pertaining to the impact of interventions in the Indian court system are amenable to empirical research. Expanding such analyses to other courts will strengthen the discourse on court vacations by shifting from pure normative perspectives to empirically grounded questions on whether vacations actually increase the productivity of a court.

References

Pavithra Manivannan, Susan Thomas and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah (2023), Helping litigants make informed choices in resolving debt disputes, The Leap Blog, 15 June 2023.

Law Commission of India (2009), Reforms in the Judiciary: Some suggestions, Report No. 230, August 2009.

Alex Tsun (2020), Chapter 9, Applications to Computing, Probability & Statistics with Applications to Computing, 2020.

Tushar Anand and Pavithra Manivannan are researchers at XKDR Forum and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah is a doctoral candidate at the National University of Singapore. The authors thank Susan Thomas and Geetika Palta for useful discussions.

Survey-based measurement of Indian courts

by Pavithra Manivannan, Susan Thomas, and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah.

Public institutions do not face a market test. Achieving state capacity is about establishing checks and balances. The traditional idea is to instrument the operations, and construct an operational MIS, which is released into the public domain. Through this, deficiencies of the working of the organisation are visible to researchers and the public. The other pathway is to ask the persons who interact with the state institution about what they feel, to elicit their perceptions. This is an important pathway to obtain evidence and thus create feedback loops. For instance, citizen surveys are commonly used to assess the quality and impact of public services such as health and education (UNDP 2021, Clifton et al, 2020, OECD-ADB 2019).

In the legal system, perception surveys of court users can generate useful knowledge about how well courts function in their delivery of justice (National Center for State Courts, 2005). Ongoing surveys of user experience of courts can help measure the performance of a component of the entire legal system, and in assessing the impact of interventions made for reforming the legal system.

Surveys of court users and the public on their perception of the judiciary have been prevalent in developed countries from the 1990s, and are gaining currency in India (eg., Dougherty et al, 2006; Rottman and Tyler, 2014; Staats et al, 2005; Daksh 2016). Such surveys seek to capture the perceptions of court users on qualitative metrics (Manivannan et al, 2022). Such metrics can be used to evaluate the functioning of a single court, or compare alternative courts.

On one hand, perceptions are not reality. On the other hand, the views of end-users of the justice system are particularly important because, ultimately, the justice system exists to serve end-users whose interests and preferences may differ from those of judges and lawyers. We can readily discern certain difficulties in survey-based measurement of perceptions:

1. There are many different users of a court, who differ in their extent of knowledge. Litigants who see a court case as a disruption of their daily lives, may see things differently when compared with lawyers, for whom courts are part of their professional lives.
2. A person who loses a case is likely to be unhappy with his experience of the court and vice versa.
3. Different individuals might be working on non-comparable cases, and their subjective experience of the court is then not comparable.
4. It is not clear what is an objective benchmark of sound performance. A perfect court may be prohibitively expensive. Users of courts may have normalised a variety of difficulties; their `satisfaction' may only flow from learned helplessness.
5. It is important to narrowly measure a court or a group of courts, and make claims about the narrow unit of observation, as opposed to bigger claims about the Indian legal system.

In 2023, we conducted two pilot surveys to evaluate their utility as feedback loops for courts.

One survey was administered to understand the functioning of five alternative forums that can be approached to adjudicate matters of debt disputes: the Bombay benches of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), the Debt Recovery Tribunal (DRT), the Bombay High Court (Bom HC), the Metropolitan Magistrate (MM) courts (which adjudicates criminal proceedings for cheque bouncing cases), and the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) process.

To help improve data quality, the survey was conducted on practitioners who had multiple instances of interacting with the five courts. By selecting practitioners that have had repeated instances of approaching these forums to resolve disputes, the survey results are less vulnerable to the 'loser' effect. To obtain comparability, we presented a hypothetical, canonical problem of debt dispute resolution to each survey respondent. We then asked them to rank the five forums on five dimensions of court performance, namely, efficiency, effectiveness, predictability, independence, cost and convenience, and calculated the average rank for each forum on each of these dimensions.

The second survey was conducted with litigants at the DRT, with the objective of understanding the functioning of this court. For this, we deployed a team of four, who visited the premises of the Bombay bench of the DRT. The team administered a survey questionnaire on individuals, in order to evaluate the performance of the DRT on the above mentioned five dimensions. The participants were asked to rate their experience at the DRT on a five-point scale.

Method

Survey design

We used a combination of qualitative (in-depth expert interviews and open-ended comments) and quantitative surveys (multiple choice and scaled questions). Qualitative surveys with experts provide more contextual insights, enable comprehensive analysis. They helped validate our founding conjecture, the idea that there was a class of disputes which could go to multiple different forums. However, these surveys were time-intensive and it was difficult to obtain the interest and involvement of experts.

Survey mode

We administered the survey in both online and offline formats. Surveying litigants on court premises was challenging in two ways. First, litigants do not always accompany their lawyers to courts, especially in disputes of larger sizes involving firms. Second, one forum may deal with multiple type of disputes (civil v. criminal; mergers v. insolvency). This poses difficulty in identifying a litigant with a desired case-type.

The questionnaire used for the surveys and the responses collected can be found here.

Results: The perceptions of practitioners

The practitioner survey involved eliciting their choice of forum for the following hypothetical, canonical problem:

Q is a large public listed company. It has availed of a working capital loan of Rs. 7 crores from N, a small sized NBFC, repayable within three years with simple interest @16% p.a. Q and N are 100% domestically owned. As collateral for the loan, Q has granted N a floating charge over some of its movable assets, for example, its machinery or its inventory. One year into the loan, Q defaults on its loan to N. The outstanding amount exceeds Rs.1 crore. Post-dated cheques issued by Q towards interest payment bounce due to insufficient funds. The collateral is not sufficient to cover the outstanding amount. You are advising N.

The survey respondents were asked to make two assumptions, namely, that the limitation period is the same across all the courts; and that all courts have jurisdiction.

We collected responses from 18 respondents, of which 16 were lawyers and two were key managerial personnel at an asset reconstruction company and a debt restructuring advisory firm. Six of our respondents had between 20 to 30 years of experience in this area, eight of them had experience of less than 20 years, and two of them had more than 30 years experience in this field. They had significant experience with many of the venues of interest: 14 had experience with the NCLT and the Bom HC, 11 with the DRT and ADR process, and 5 with the MM Courts.

We aggregated the ranks assigned by the respondents to each of these forums on the parameters of independence, efficiency, effectiveness, predictability and access, and averaged them to arrive at an overall rank for each forum. The specific statements on which the respondents ranked the forums and their ranks are presented in Table 1. The forums are arranged in increasing order of the average rankings on each parameter. The NCLT was ranked the highest on the parameter of Efficiency, followed by ADR, the Bom HC, the DRT and the Metropolitan Magistrate. On the other hand, the Bom HC was ranked as the most preferred forum of choice on the parameter of independence.

Table 1: Preference ordering of five debt enforcement forums

Metric	Survey Statement	Ranking
		1	2	3	4	5
Efficiency	Most likely to dispose of my matter in a timely manner	NCLT	ADR	Bom HC	DRT	MM Courts
Effectiveness	Easiest to recover the amount awarded in the judgement decree.	NCLT	Bom HC	DRT, ADR	MM Courts
Predictability	(i) Expected sequence of stages in my matter was clear.	NCLT	ADR	Bom HC	DRT	MM Courts
	(ii) Hearings are most likely to be held as scheduled.	ADR	NCLT	Bom HC	MM Courts	DRT
Independence	Decisions are most likely made based on the merits of the case.	Bom HC	ADR	NCLT	MM Courts	DRT
Access	(i) Can afford to take my case to this forum.	MM Courts	DRT	NCLT	Bom HC	ADR
	(ii) Ease of navigation; staff helpfulness; website; ease of filing process	ADR	Bom HC	NCLT	DRT	MM Courts

Table 1 contains new insights on a specific court on each attribute. For example, while the Bom HC and the ADR process are perceived to be most unbiased, they are perceived as more expensive to access. ADR is perceived to be most predictable, but less effective on actually getting the relief. The NCLT, on the other hand, is perceived to be more efficient and effective, when compared to the other forums, but less likely to also be unbiased. The DRT and the Metropolitan Magistrate courts are perceived unfavourably on all aspects, except affordability.

Results: The perceptions of litigants

The in-person survey conducted at the DRT observed 55 persons, who were presently a party to a dispute at the DRT. Among these, 24 were debtors, 19 were creditors, and 12 belonged to the residual category, such as court/privately appointed receivers and auction awardees. Of these, 30.6% were at early stages (admission), 28.6% were at advanced stages (such as post-admission or pending last hearing), and 22.4% were awaiting a final hearing or pronouncement of judgement.

Litigants at the DRT had more positive perceptions than practitioners. Litigants ranked the DRT the highest on predictability of the hearing: most litigants agreed that when a hearing for their case is scheduled at the DRT, it will be held on the scheduled date. About 67-69% of litigants perceived the DRT to be an affordable and unbiased forum to resolve their dispute. More creditors ranked it higher (85-89%) on these two metrics than debtors (58-62%). However, 52% of litigants did not think that the DRT resolves cases in a timely manner.

Discussion

Good performance by the judicial branch in a country is essential. As with all aspects of public policy, this requires the loop of evidence, identification of difficulties, creative policy proposals, policy reforms, and measurement of the gains. In the legal system, generally, evidence and measurement involves quantitative measures. In this article, we have shown a case study where survey-based evidence was useful. This constitutes a useful additional pathway to measurement of the legal system.

Litigants are the ultimate end-users of courts, so their views matter greatly, but their information set may be limited. Legal practitioners have better information through repeated interactions and potentially observation of multiple venues, but their views may not capture the views of the litigants themselves. In the future, it would be useful to go further, by way of surveying the general public, measuring the view of persons who have not experienced litigation at a given location.

References

Shaun Bowler, Joseph L. Staats, and Jonathan T. Hiskey (2005). Measuring Judicial Performance in Latin America, Latin American Politics and Society.

Judith Cliftona, Marcos Fernandez-Gutierrez and Michael Howlett (2020). Assessing public services from the citizen perspective: What can we learn from surveys?, Journal of Economic Policy Reform.

Daksh (2016). Access to Justice Survey, A DAKSH report.

David B. Rottman and Tom R. Tyler (2014). Thinking about judges and judicial performance: Perspective of the Public and Court users, Onati Socio-legal Series.

Devendra Damle and Tushar Anand (2020). Problems with the e-Courts data, NIPFP Working Paper Series 314.

George W. Dougherty, Stephanie A. Lindquist and Mark D. Bradbury (2006). Evaluating Performance in State Judicial Institutions: Trust and Confidence in the Georgia Judiciary, State and Local Government Review.

Institute of Social Studies and Analysis (2021). Satisfaction with Public Services in Georgia, United Nations Development Programme.

National Center for State Courts (2005). CourTools: Trial Court Performance Measures.

Pavithra Manivannan, Susan Thomas and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah (2022). Evaluating contract enforcement by courts in India: a litigant's lens, XKDR Working Paper No. 16.

Pavithra Manivannan, Susan Thomas and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah (2023). Helping litigants make informed choices in resolving debt disputes, The Leap Blog.

OECD-ADB (2019). Government at a Glance Southeast Asia, Serving Citizens: Citizen satisfaction with public services and institutions, OECD Publishing, Paris.

Pavithra Manivannan and Susan Thomas are researchers at XKDR Forum, Mumbai. Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah is a doctoral candidate at the National University of Singapore. We thank Surya Prakash B.S., Renuka Sane, and Anjali Sharma for their suggestions on the design of the surveys. We acknowledge the very diligent assistance by Nell Crasto and Balveer Godara, students at Kirit P. Mehta School of Law, NMIMS Mumbai, on conducting the litigant survey. We are grateful to all the survey respondents for their generous participation, and thank Mahesh Krishnamurthy, K.P. Krishnan, Sachin Malhan, Harish Narsappa, Rashika Narain, Geetika Palta, Siddarth Raman, Ajay Shah, and Arun Thiruvengadam for their comments and suggestions on this work.

How substantial are non-substantive hearings in Indian courts: some estimates from Bombay

by Pavithra Manivannan, Karthik Suresh, Susan Thomas, and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah.

The problem

If we think about court as a services production organisation, then the number of staff, technology and other resources would be inputs to deliver well-defined outcomes of litigants' cases being decided satisfactorily. In between these inputs and outcome are hearings as the output of courts. Hearings are where the matter of the dispute is presented in front of a judge. When hearings are substantive, progress is made in resolving the dispute.

Not all hearings are substantive. Some non-substantive hearings are inevitable, involving procedural matters such as the filing of documents. When a hearing is non-substantive because the matter is rescheduled to a later date, this imposes a burden of time and cost upon litigants and the court.

Such unexpected non-substantive hearings are an important problem in the Indian legal system. The Civil Procedure Code (1909) prescribes a limit of three adjournments per case, but reality often diverges from this stated limit. In 2021, the e-committee of the Supreme Court has proposed an alert for judges to be informed about breaches in this 3-adjournment rule within its case management system. There is thus a recognition of the presence of this problem.

What is not, at present, known is a quantitative sense of the improtance of the problem. In this article, we estimate the magnitude of non-substantive hearings for one group of situations. The working of the Indian legal system varies widely by venue and case type. In order to measure the phenomenon of non-substantive hearings, we pick one relatively homogeneous class of disputes --- debt dispute resolution --- which are heard at three courts in Bombay. They are the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), the Debt Recovery Tribunal (DRT), and the Bombay High Court (Bombay HC). For these three venues, we seek to estimate four quantities:

1. What is the fraction of substantive hearings in these courts?
2. Out of the hearings in a case, how many are substantive?
3. How much time elapses till a first substantive hearing?
4. How likely is the first hearing to be a substantive hearing?

Definitions and estimates

An understanding of the number and likelihood of such hearings is important to set litigant expectations about the time and costs spent when seeking redress from the court. Regy and Roy (2015) use the term 'failed hearing' in their work on understanding what causes delays at the Delhi Debt Recovery Tribunal (DRT). They classify failed hearings as those hearings that satisfy three criteria: the hearing resulted in an adjournment without any judicial business, the adjournment was avoidable and the adjournment was not penalised. Khaitan et al. (2017) record hearings as 'inefficient' in their study on court efficiency, where the definition of an efficient court is based on whether the court meets set deadlines or not. In their work on cases from the Delhi High Court, they record hearings as 'inefficient' when there is a failure, either because of the court ('insufficient time to hear the case', 'absent judge') or because of either party ('counsel sought time', 'Absent counsel', 'Delay condoned', 'Restoration'). These papers present us with the earliest estimates of non-substantive hearings. Regy and Roy (2017) record 58% of hearings at the DRT as failed hearings. Khaitan et al (2017) record 48% of hearings at the Delhi HC as inefficient. Both suggest that attempts to reduce adjournments could reduce court delays by up to 50-60%, based on these estimates.

The Ministry of Law, Justice and Company Affairs, in the context of fees payable to government counsel, refer to 'Effective hearings' and 'Substantial work'. Effective hearings are where either one or both parties are heard by the court, while 'non-effective' hearings are where 'the case is mentioned and adjourned or only directions are given or only judgement is delivered by the court'. The same memorandum refers to substantial work as 'when the case has been admitted by the Court after hearing of preliminary objections or filing of the affidavits/counter-affidavits etc. by the Counsel'. These definitions guide a distinction between adjournments and non-substantive hearings.

In this article, we broaden the notion of differentiating non-substantive hearings beyond adjournments. Only hearings where there is application of judicial mind to the resolution of the dispute, are classified as 'substantive'. Thus hearings that involve disposals, withdrawal, admission, reporting settlement, are classified as substantive hearings. Adjournments are classified within non-substantive hearings. A reading of the order for an adjourned hearing may simply have a next date given for a hearing. These may be adjournments on account of paucity of time, time sought by parties, non-appearance of parties, wrongly listed or technical glitches. We also classify hearings as non-substantive when orders in which the court gives directions to file pleadings or take on record pleadings. Hearings that involve matters of procedure, without a substantial impact on the resolution of the dispute itself, are taken as non-substantive for a litigant.

The dataset

We hand-constructed a novel dataset, where for a sample of cases, we built the existing case life-cycle by collating all the hearings for a given case. We then read and classified each hearing in the case life-cycle as a substantive or a non-substantive hearing using the approach listed in the previous section. Since each judge records what transpired at the hearing in her own style, parsing and classifying every order necessarily involved a subjective judgement about whether it is a substantive hearing, or not. Therefore, once we had classified orders, we then subjected the classification to a double-blind peer review.

We built this dataset for cases of debt dispute resolution, using orders collected from the websites of the High Court (HC), DRT and NCLT in Bombay. The analysis was done for a random sample of 200 matters from each of the three courts. In these samples, we selected 100 disposed cases and 100 pending cases for each court. The hearing dates ran between 2018 and 2022.

One difference in how orders are uploaded on the Bombay HC versus the two tribunals is important to take note of: each court follows a different timeline for uploading case life-cycle data. On the Bombay HC website, the case appears from the date of filing. For the tribunal courts, the case appear on their respective websites only from the first hearing date, irrespective of the filing date of the case. Since the sample of cases from each court was drawn at random, there could be cases in the Bombay HC without a hearing, while this is not possible with cases in the sample from the tribunal courts. Further, this makes a strict comparison of hearing characteristics at the Bombay HC and the tribunal courts difficult. These differences impose constraints on how various measures are calculated for each court, in order to enable a balanced comparison across the courts.

Findings: What is the fraction of substantive hearings in the three courts?

Table 1: Fraction of substantive hearings to total hearings in three debt dispute resolution courts

Court	Hearings in full sample			Hearings in disposed cases
	Total	Substantive	Fraction		Total	Substantive	Fraction
Bombay HC*	399	192	0.34*		208	139	0.48*
DRT	575	229	0.40		267	116	0.43
NCLT	1135	258	0.23		365	145	0.40

^{*57 cases at the Bombay HC had zero hearings. The fractions reported for the Bombay HC have been adjusted to account for this.}

Table 1 shows the total number of hearings, the number of substantive hearings and the ratio of substantive to total hearings in the three courts. The number of non-substantive hearings can be calculated as (Total hearings - Substantive hearings). This table shows that the NCLT generates the lowest ratio of substantive hearings among the three courts, while the Bombay HC outputs the highest ratio.

Table 1 also shows the data on the ratio of substantive hearings for disposed cases in the three courts. This indicates two features: first, the court generates a higher fraction of substantive hearings in the case of disposed cases. This means that there is a higher number of substantive hearings among hearings for cases that have been disposed. But, there are still fewer substantive hearings than non-substantive hearings. Less than than 50% of all hearings for disposed cases are substantive hearings. This observation holds for all three courts. This suggests that process improvements that simplify administrative hearings or reduce the incidence of adjournments will have a significant improvement in the experience of the litigant in these courts.

The above finding relates to the outputs generated by the courts as a whole, in relation to each other. The litigant focus will be more on what we observe about hearings per case. We examine these questions next.

Findings: What is the fraction of substantive hearings per case in the three courts?

Table 2 shows the summary statistics of hearings per case in the sample. The values presented include the minimum, median, maximum and average number of hearings per case.

Table 2: Number of hearings per case for three debt dispute resolution courts

Court	Hearings			Substantive hearings
	Median	Average		Median	Average
Bombay HC	1	1.21*		1	0.43*
DRT	3	2.88		1	0.82*
NCLT	5	5.68		1	0.91*

^{*Each court has a different number of cases for which substantive hearings could be observed. The counts are 79 cases in the Bombay HC, 57 cases in the DRT and 60 cases in the NCLT with no substantive hearings}

Table 2 shows two values for each court: the average number of hearings per case, and the average number of substantive hearings per case. We see that the Bombay HC has the lowest average number of hearings per case (1.21). The NCLT has the largest number of hearings per case (5.68). This indicates that NCLT has more than 3 times the hearings per case compared to the Bombay HC. It holds more than 2 times the average number of hearings at the DRT which has 2.88 hearings per case, on average.

When comparing the values of the average number of hearings per case to the average number of substantive hearings per case, Table 2 shows that all courts have less than 1 substantive hearing per case, on average. The NCLT has the highest average number of substantive hearings per case (0.91) but it is less than one. The average number of substantive hearings per case for the DRT is almost the same as the NCLT, despite the number of hearings per case being double at the NCLT. This suggests that for every 6 hearings at the NCLT, one is likely to be substantive, while for every 3 hearings at the DRT, one is likely to be substantive. If the number of hearings can be used as a proxy for the cost of filing a case in court, then NCLT is likely to be the lowest benefit to cost for the litigant.

But, the hearing or substantive hearing per case is often not the sole objective for a litigant who approaches court for the resolution of debt. What is also important is the time within which the substantive hearing can be reached. For this, we next examine what is the expected time to the first substantive hearing.

Finding: Time to first substantive hearing

When the case gets a first substantive hearing is an important milestone for a litigant. It is likely to be a hearing in which substantive oral arguments will be made on questions such as the admission of the matter before the court, questions of interim relief that will operate pending the final disposal of the matter, the impleadment of new parties to the matter, the time schedule for the filing of replies and counter-replies, and so on. Setting an expectation on when such a hearing is likely to be conducted after the case is filed, is therefore an important input to preparing for the case.

We use a survival analysis approach to estimate the time to a first substantive hearing after the filing date (Manivannan et al, 2023). Figure 1 shows two survivor functions for each court. The survivor function can be represented as a curve on a graph, which shows the chances of not getting a first hearing / substantive hearing (on the y-axis) against time from filing the case in court (on the x-axis). When the case is first filed, the chance of not getting a substantive hearing is 1 or 100%. I.e., at the outset, all cases experience no hearing / substantive hearing. As time progresses, this number starts to become lower than 1. The `faster' the curve drops from 1, the higher the chances that the case had a first hearing / substantive hearing. On each graph, the darker line shows the chances of a first substantive hearing, while the lighter line shows the chances of a first hearing.

The graph for the Bombay HC (in red) shows that at the end of one year, 40% of the cases have not obtained one hearing. When we focus on substantive hearings only, 60% of the cases have not achieved this milestone. The dark and light line are clearly separated, which indicates that these two values are distinctly different from each other.

The graph for the DRT (in green) shows that 77% of the cases have not got one hearing at the end of the first year after filing. When we focus on substantive hearings only, this is true for 80% of the cases. This means that only 20% of the cases can be expected to get a substantive hearing by the end of the first year from filing.

The graph for the NCLT (in blue) shows that at the end of one year, a little less than 50% of the cases have not got one hearing. When we focus on substantive hearings only, this fraction goes up to 70%. This means that 30% of the cases are likely to have achieved a first substantial hearing in the first year from filing. The gap between the curves for the first hearing and the first substantive hearing is the largest for the NCLT, among the three venues.

These graphs show that the litigant is most likely to get a first substantive hearing within one year of filing from the BHC.

We have chosen to estimate the chances of getting a first hearing and a first substantive hearing in one year after the case has been filed. But these same graphs can be equally used to estimate the chance of a first substantive hearing for shorter or longer periods of time also. For example, the chance of a first hearing within one month of filing the case is the highest at the NCLT, followed by the DRT, and last, at the Bombay HC. Similarly, the graphs show that the chances of getting a first substantive hearing within one month of filing is the highest at the NCLT, up to three months after filing. But if the case is not heard within this time, the chances of getting either a first hearing or a first substantive hearing are higher for a case which is filed at the Bombay HC.

Conclusion

Unpredictable non-substantive hearings constitute a process failure. In this article, we show that for one kind of matter (debt dispute resolution), at three venues, the fraction of non-substantive hearings is 64%, 60% and 77%. From the litigants' perspective of measuring the performance of courts, if a good measure is the fraction of matters that get to a substantive hearing within the first year after filing, we find that this value stands below 50% for all the courts studied.

There is merit in establishing systematic mechanisms for computing such performance metrics. These findings can help litigants estimate the possibilities of events and expenditures, after a case begins. Such information systems would help improve decision-making about suing, about settling, and the choice of venue, for the litigant. A regular estimation of these metrics can also be a useful guide for changes made in court processes, with the understanding that a change in performance metric will be some complex combination of the process change, along with the change in the response of the people who both make up the legal system, and those who use it.

Finally, this work highlights the difference in objectives for which performance metrics need to be designed. While the producer (court) will find it optimal to use the ratio of aggregate substantive to total hearings, the litigant will optimise based on the metric of substantive hearings per case which can lead to a different choice relative to what the court might expect.

References

Nitika Khaitan, Shalini Seetharam and Sumathi Chandrashekaran (2017), Inefficiency and Judicial Delay: New Insights from the Delhi High Court , Vidhi, March 2017.

Pavithra Manivannan, Susan Thomas and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah (2023), Helping litigants make informed choices in resolving debt disputes, The Leap Blog, 15 June 2023.

Prasanth Regy and Shubho Roy (2017), Understanding Judicial delays in debt tribunals, NIPFP Working Paper 195, May 2017.

Pavithra Manivannan, Karthik Suresh, and Susan Thomas are researchers at XKDR Forum, Mumbai. Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah is a doctoral candidate at the National University of Singapore. We thank Geetika Palta for data support, and Purbasha Panda for her support in reading through the case orders. We also thank two anonymous referees and Ajay Shah for useful feedback and comments.

Helping litigants make informed choices in resolving debt disputes

by Pavithra Manivannan, Susan Thomas, and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah.

The Indian legal system faces numerous difficulties, and the discourse on legal system reforms has emphasised the workings of the courts from the perspective of judges and registries. Such a focus is not so useful for litigants who are also participants in the legal system. The decisions that they make and the incentives that they face add up to create the case load at the courts.

Consider a supplier of spare parts to a certain manufacturer, who has not been paid her dues. Her lawyer advises her of multiple legal remedies that she can use to recover her dues, from filing a money suit before a civil court to pursuing arbitration proceedings outside a court to initiating insolvency proceedings against the manufacturing company. How would she decide which legal remedy to pursue? More generally, litigants make four classes of decisions: Should one sue? Should one appeal? When faced with a certain proffer, should one settle? When alternative forums are available, which one to prefer? Flaws in a litigant's decision making when faced with such decisions reshape the case flow of courts. In the Indian legal system reform discussion, it is important to think about the incentives and the decision-making of litigants.

At present, litigants make these decisions based on their own, generally limited, prior experience. They are advised by lawyers who specialise in a certain forum. However, lawyers tend to be specialists in one forum or another, and often know impressions rather than systematic evidence. Further, lawyers have an interest in the litigant's decision. Under these conditions, the decisions of litigants might sometimes be sub-optimal.

First steps in measurement

All the four types of litigant decisions - to sue, to appeal, to settle and to choose a forum - involve forecasting the time taken in the legal process, and associated expenses. In an ideal world, litigant decision making would be supported by statistical systems that forecast these two numbers.

In this article, we develop a legal system measurement that can produce such insights for litigants, who are litigating on a narrow class of problems. We do this for three Bombay courts, as a proof of concept of a simple analysis that can help litigants.

The narrow class of problems that we focus on are debt dispute resolutions. Several laws in India allow the enforcement of debt contracts in different forms, which provides us a unique opportunity to compare their relative performance in providing redress for debt default. There are also multiple courts and tribunals that adjudicate disputes on debt contracts in different ways. We choose three in Bombay to study:

1. The Bombay High Court which has original jurisdiction to adjudicate high value contractual matters.

2. The Mumbai bench of the Debt Recovery Tribunal (or DRT), which is a specialised tribunal that has been adjudicating recovery of debts due to banks and financial institutions since 1993.

3. The Mumbai bench of the National Companies Law Tribunal (or NCLT), which is a specialised tribunal adjudicating insolvency petitions against companies.

We build on earlier work that points out that litigants are found to care about the access, efficiency, effectiveness, independence, and predictability of judgements (Manivannan et al, 2023). It is known that secondary data (such as those from court websites) have constraints: (a) it can be used to measure only a subset of these aspects; and (b) even this subset cannot be necessarily computed for all the comparable courts. Assuming that access is not a constraint, Manivannan et al (2023) suggest that the litigant can get an estimate of what she can expect of the amount of time in the court, for each of these courts. They point out that it is possible to get an estimate of what she can expect of costs she will incur, through the expected number of hearings at a given court, where each hearing induces a certain unit cost.

In this article, we move towards three new questions in the field of litigant decision making:

1. How likely is it to get a first hearing in the first year from filing the case in the court?
2. How likely is it that the matter will get disposed in the first year from the filing of the case?
3. How many hearings are most likely to take place in the first year from the filing of the case?

While the first two questions help to address the efficiency in terms of time expected in a court, the third can be used as a proxy for the kind of costs that a litigant can expect from a given court, since every hearing requires the time of (and fees charged by) legal counsel.

Data description

We collect and analyse sample data of cases involving debt disputes, which were listed and heard at three courts in Bombay for the period from September 2021 to December 2022 ('sample period'). The websites of these fora record cases filed across different timelines and do not archive case life cycles of historical cases. This sample period allows us to compare cases that have been filed at the same time and therefore have comparable life cycles.

• In the case of the Bombay HC, the selected matters include suits, summary suits, commercial suits and commercial summary suits, filed under its original jurisdiction.

• For the DRT, we extract cases arising under the Recovery of Debts Due to Banks and Financial Institutions (RDDBFI) Act, 1993, and the Securitization & Reconstruction of Financial Assets & Enforcement of Security Interest (SARFAESI) Act, 2002.

• For the NCLT, we extract all cases listed under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC). We understand that cases involving debt enforcement will be covered under these case-types at the relevant court.

Table 1 shows the number of cases in the data set for all the three courts. We additionally include the status of these cases as pending or disposed. A case is categorised as disposed of by the courts where the disposal is by way of a decree passed by the court, or if it is settled, or it is has been withdrawn for any reason.

Table 1: Distribution of cases

Court	Total	Disposed	Pending
Bombay HC	1243	159	1084
DRT	843	125	718
NCLT	2645	897	1748

Thus, for the same period of time, there have been a different number of applications in the matter of debt dispute resolution in these three courts.

While, this can be used to calculate the 'disposal rate' of matters in each court, these measures suffer from two limitations. It does not take into consideration the duration of the pending cases. Further, it does not take into account that the amounts involved and the complexity are different in the cases handled at different courts. An approach that takes these aspects into account is the survival analysis modelling approach.

Statistical analysis

'Survival analysis' is a method for modelling the time to an event of interest. If the event of interest is the time to disposal, the model will yield the estimated probability of a case being completed between any two timepoints t1 and t2.

Survival analysis models have been previously employed to study judicial delays including at the Income Tax Tribunals (Datta et al, 2017) and at the NCLTs (Shah and Thomas 2018, Bhatia et al, 2019). In this article, we draw on the intuition of survival analysis and offer simple estimates of two quantities (for each of the three courts):

• What is the probability of a case being being heard atleast once within one year? The first hearing is generally an important milestone for a litigant to know the possibility of getting interim relief. How likely it is that this will happen within the very first year?
• What is the probability that the case is disposed of in the first year?

These probabilities are estimated for each of the three chosen courts separately on matters of debt dispute resolution. Much of the earlier research have computed and presented sample means of completed cases only, without taking into account cases that have not been completed. The standard techniques of survival analysis fare well on harnessing information using observations of cases that have not completed as well.

Q1: Chances of getting a first hearing in the first year from filing of a case

Figure 1 presents a graph of the survivor function for a matter getting a first hearing across the Bombay HC, the DRT and the NCLT. Here, time to first hearing is on the x-axis. We pull up the probability of getting to the first hearing within a year from these curves for the three courts and present this in Table 2.

Table 2: Chance of first hearing within the first year at Bombay HC, DRT, NCLT

	(in %)
Bombay HC	36.6
DRT	94.0
NCLT	99.8

A case at the NCLT has the highest chance (of nearly 100%) of being heard with the first year from its filing. There is nearly a similar probability of a first hearing at the DRT within the first year, with a 94% chance. At the Bombay HC, on the other hand, there is a less than 40% chance that a similar matter will get a first hearing within a year of being filed.

Using this approach, we could similarly estimate the probability of a case being heard atleast once within say, the first three months of filing. Our analysis finds that for a litigant at the NCLT, there is an 86% chance of getting atleast one hearing within the first three months of filing a case. The corresponding probabilities for the DRT and the Bom HC are 74% and 5% respectively.

Q2: Chances of getting a case disposed in the first year from filing of a case

Figure 2: the survivor function for disposal for three courts

Figure 2 shows the litigant the chances of a debt dispute resolution matter getting disposed, within one year of it being filed in each of these three courts. This presents a very different picture than for the survivor function for the chances of getting a first hearing that we see in Figure 1. The chances of disposal are (logically) much lower at any given point in time. Table 3 presents the chances of disposal of case within the first year of being filed. The NCLT has the highest chance of disposal at nearly 40%. Between the Bombay HC and the DRT, the DRT has a higher chance at 17.3%. But the Bombay HC has a similar chance at 16.3% of the case being disposed within the first year.

Table 3: Chance of disposal within the first year at Bombay HC, DRT, NCLT

	(in %)
Bombay HC	16.1
DRT	17.0
NCLT	39.3

Q3: Expected number of hearings in the first year from the filing

So far, we have focused on the time to completion, which matters greatly through its impact upon the net present value of the moneys recovered. We now turn to the question of the costs of ligitation. We compute the expected number of hearings within the year and present these in Table 4. We recognise that there is a sharp distinction between substantial hearings and infructuous hearings, but in the present state of the research, we treat both alike.

Table 4: Expected number of hearings within the first year at Bombay HC, DRT, NCLT

	Number
Bombay HC	0.4
DRT	2.7
NCLT	4.0

The NCLT has the highest expected number of hearings within the first year of filing at 4 hearings, while the Bombay HC has the least (not even one hearing may happen within the first year of filing).

Using these estimates, a litigant can estimate her legal costs for the first year. For example, we now know that a litigant will face 4 hearings, on average, in the first year after filing at the NCLT. If the legal fees that she is charged by her legal team are Rs.100,000 per hearing, on average, this implies that she can expect to pay Rs.400,000 in the first year from filing.

Discussion

Better decisions by litigants are not only valuable for the litigants, but will also improve the working of the Indian legal system. We have shown simple statistical results about delay and costs at three alternate venues for one narrow class of matters. These results point out the differences that exist among three courts, in terms of the kinds of legal remedies they offer, their administrative processes and their capacity. Litigants would have to weigh those considerations also in their thinking.

These results have many interesting implications. For instance, if a bank strategically prefers an early first hearing, it might be better off instituting proceedings at the NCLT compared to the DRT, even if the latter is a forum dedicated to banks and financial institutions. On the other hand, if a bank prefers disposal within fewer hearings compared to an earlier first hearing, the analysis indicates that it is better to approach the DRT.

We recognize that there may be other considerations that weigh with the litigant in making her decisions. For example, Mannivannan et al, 2021 find that litigants also care about the fairness of a judge and the effectiveness of the remedy. But our analysis in this article focuses on metrics that can be evaluated with secondary data from courts. Another consideration is that the analysis does not consider the nature of the legal remedies offered by the three courts. While litigants may approach the Bom HC and the DRT for debt recovery, the NCLT offers a remedy of insolvency resolution. But creditors in India find it optimal to use both recovery and resolution processes to recover their dues. Finally, it is not that the litigant prefers one forum over another, but that important metrics such as the probability of disposal within a given time frame allows the litigant to choose one among multiple choices of forum.

We believe that the comparative approach in this article can be extended in, at least, three ways. First, these measures can be calculated for locations other than Bombay. A comparative exercise of this kind can potentially help understand benches with bottlenecks and potential areas of improvement. Second, within this class of matters, statistical modelling can permit these estimates to vary with case characteristics. Finally, these measures needs to be calculated beyond this narrow class of matters. For example, such an approach could offer more clarity to litigants involved in involuntary litigation, such as criminal litigation.

The data used for this analysis can be found here. The dataset can be cited as Manivannan, Pavithra and Thomas, Susan and Zaveri-Shah, Bhargavi (2023), "Helping litigants make informed choices in resolving debt disputes".

If you're interested in seeing other WIP applications of this framework, XKDR Forum is organizing a roundtable in Mumbai on the 17th of June (Saturday).

References:

Bhatia, S., Singh, M., & Zaveri, B. (2019). Time to resolve insolvencies in India. The Leap Blog, March 11, 2019.

Datta, Pratik & Surya Prakash B. S. & Sane, Renuka, (2017), Understanding Judicial Delay at the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal in India, Working Papers 17/208, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy.

Manivannan, Pavithra and Thomas, Susan and Zaveri, Bhargavi, Evaluating Contract Enforcement by Courts in India: A Litigant's Lens (November 26, 2022). Also available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4286562.

Shah, A., & Thomas, S. (2018). The Indian bankruptcy reform: The state of the art, 2018. The Leap Blog, December 22, 2018.

Pavithra Manivannan and Susan Thomas are researchers at XKDR Forum. Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah is a doctoral candidate at the National University of Singapore. We thank Ajay Shah for inputs on the survival analysis, Geetika Palta for research and data support, Tushar Anand for helping out with corrections to the data, and participants of the internal seminar series at XKDR Forum for their comments and feedback.

Author: Pavithra Manivannan

Pavithra Manivannan is a Senior Research Associate at XKDR Forum and Chennai Mathematical Institute.

On this blog:

• Beyond Pendency: Counting Cases Correctly, 5 October 2025.
• Do court vacations matter: evidence from the Bombay High Court, 23 September 2024.
• Survey-based measurement of Indian courts, 13 January 2024.
• How substantial are non-substantive hearings in Indian courts: some estimates from Bombay, 6 December 2023.
• Helping litigants make informed choices in resolving debt disputes, 15 June 2023.
• Delays in government contracting: A tale of two metros, 23 December 2022.
• The litigant perspective upon courts, 28 November 2022.
• Timeliness in government contracting: Evidence from the country's largest metro-rail network, 22 August 2022.
• How did courts respond to the pandemic lockdowns: evidence from the NCLT, 27 March 2022.
• How large is the payment delays problem in Indian public procurement?, 22 March 2021.

Delays in government contracting: A tale of two metros

by Anirudh Burman and Pavithra Manivannan.

A state entity undertaking a procurement exercise must meet prescribed timelines throughout its procurement pipeline. Delays in one or more milestones adversely affect all parties involved: the procuring entity (increase in expenditure beyond the budget and disputes), the contracted vendors (uncertainty and delays in payment) and the public (delays in utilising public goods and services). At the outset, we recognise that the indicator of a successful procurement exercise are multi-fold: achieving required quality, adhering to timeline and limiting spending gap. Our approach employs the lack of delays as the indicator of a successful procurement exercise.

In a recent article, we examined the extent to which DMRC's (the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation) competence in timely project execution was borne out by data. We found that (a) DMRC is able to meet the Government of India's and its own stipulations in two stages of its procurement process, that is, contract award and vendor payments; and (b) In spite of this exemplary performance, DMRC has faced delays in overall project implementation that have gradually increased over time. This article seeks to understand the underlying factors that potentially contributed to DMRC's prompt performance in its procurement process.

It is not possible to understand DMRC's success in isolation. Instead, we analyse it relative to its predecessor, the Calcutta metro-rail system (Calcutta metro). The Calcutta metro was India's first metro-rail system to be implemented. It was plagued by delays and cost overruns. Such a comparative analysis of a successful public project to one that fared worse in execution is revealing. First, it shows the learning curve of the state in building capacity to execute public projects. Second, it helps to understand what works and what does not, when a state entity conducts a procurement exercise. The analysis can serve to provide valuable feedback in procurement reform policies.

Delays in execution of metro-rail systems

Formerly, the Ministry of Railways was responsible for the construction of mass rail services, including metro-rail systems in metropolitan cities. The Ministry undertook the construction of the Calcutta metro in 1971. In 1986, the Government of India (Allocation of Business) Rules, 1961 was amended to shift the responsibility of the urban transport system to the Ministry of Urban Development (now the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs). In contrast to the Calcutta metro, the construction of the Delhi metro-rail system (Delhi metro) was undertaken by the Ministry of Urban Development as the nodal union ministry. The role of Railways was limited to providing technical assistance.

We study the annual reports of the Delhi metro and the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee Reports (1981; 1989; 1992) on the Calcutta metro, to estimate overall delays in both these projects. We source this data from the website of DMRC and the Parliament of India, respectively. Our data consists of six time periods during which there was significant procurement of works. The data includes the date of completion and submission of the detailed project report (DPR), the date on which the project received Union Cabinet approval, the date of commencement of works, the scheduled date of completion of the project, and the actual date of completion of the project, in part and full. These are presented in Table 1 below, as a timeline of events for the first line of the Calcutta metro and the first phase of the Delhi metro.

Table 1: Timeline of events

Event	Calcutta Metro Line-1	Delhi Metro Phase-1
Completion of Detailed Project Report (DPR)	1971	1995
Project sanction	1972	1996
Project commencement	1978	1997
Scheduled completion	1978	2005
Partial commission (one section)	1984	2002
Project completion (fully operational)	1995	2006

We find that the gap between estimated and actual date of completion is a little more than a year for the Delhi metro. This gap was close to two decades for the Calcutta metro. Further, the lag between the date of sanction of the project to the date of commencement of works for the project is wider for the Calcutta metro (4 years) than for the Delhi metro (about a year).

This suggests that, from 1971 to 1995, there appears to be much improvement in the way procurement was undertaken for Indian metro-rail systems. We posit that the Delhi metro's success was shaped by the challenges faced and the experiences gained in implementing the Calcutta metro. Our analysis attributes learnings from the Calcutta metro to the following structure and list of processes adopted by DMRC: its institutional design, its financing and revenue models, global transfer of technical know-how, and expertise of its early leadership. In the subsequent sections we analyse how each of these features enabled the Delhi metro to avoid inordinate delays.

The institutional design of the procuring entity

What motivated the institutional design of DMRC? To answer this we look at various Parliamentary Committee reports, CAG reports and literature on the subject. Our review suggests that there were three main institutional constraints faced by the Ministry of Railways in implementing the Calcutta metro.

1. The lack of coordination with the West Bengal State Government and the local agencies in Kolkata. There were delays in land acquisition, problems in utility diversions such as transport, water and sewage, and detection of uncharted utilities after commencement of works. These instances had a direct impact on the contracting process, such as frequent interruptions of works, revisions to scope of work, and change in construction methodology (Public Accounts Committee, 1981).
2. Frequent changes and vacancies within the Ministry of several important personnel such as the General Manager and Chief Engineer. This was due to the administrative process of the Ministry. The Railways had to follow the conditions laid down by the Appointment Committee of the Cabinet with respect to retirement, superannuation and promotion (Public Accounts Committee, 1981). This resulted in loss of experience and expertise within the procuring entity.
3. Inadequacy of financial powers delegated to the General Manager. From the year 1974 to 1982 the General Manager had the power to sanction tenders up to Rs. 1 crore only. This was increased to Rs. 2 crores in 1983 and Rs. 5 crores in 1985. This limited power of the General Manager meant, approvals for sanctions of higher value tenders had to be received from the Railway Board. This procedure was time consuming and caused delays in finalisation of contracts by up to 3 years (Public Accounts Committee, 1989).

We speculate that the above constraints prompted the authorities undertaking the Delhi metro project to adopt a different approach. The Calcutta experience provided two guides for the organisational structure of DMRC. One, to build institutional capabilities for executing a metro-rail system outside the Ministry of Railways. Second, to have a separate corporate entity with independent decision making authority. Thus, DMRC was set up with two distinguishing features which worked in its favour: It was formed as a limited liability company under the Companies Act, 1956 and the ownership of the entity vested equally in the Union and the State Government. The board of directors of DMRC constituted representatives from the Union Ministry of Urban Development, Department of Transport of GNCTD and the Delhi Development Authority. Such an institutional arrangement, by aligning incentives for all the stakeholders, enabled better coordination with the local government and ensured that the management had the backing of both the State and the Union Government. Further, functional directors appointed for distinct functions such as, project and planning, works, electrical, finance, business development and the like, had sufficient powers delegated to them under the Schedule of Powers (CAG, 2008). This facilitated quick decisions in expenditure approvals, qualification of bidders, finalisation and acceptance of contracts. Finally, the long tenure of key personnel such as the Managing Director, enabled the organisation to retain domain experience and expertise.

Financing and revenue models

For prompt execution and sustenance of any infrastructure project, timely flow of funds is essential. Metro-rail systems are capital-intensive projects. The Calcutta metro was fully funded by the Ministry of Railways. One of the main reported reasons for delay in the project was lack of funds and improper utilisation of allocated funds. Up until 1980, the Railways had not fully utilised the funds allocated for the project. Further, for subsequent years, sufficient funds were not made available for the construction. This resulted in shortage of raw materials, such as steel and signaling equipment, and delayed payments to vendors (Standing Committee on Railways, 1993; Public Accounts Committee, 1981). For the DMRC project, the Calcutta experience prompted the authorities to explore other avenues for funding such as, equity, external agency loans, subordinate loans from centre and state, property development revenue and central government grants. Most significant was the official development assistance (ODA) loan from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). Nearly 54-55 per cent of the first three phases of the DMRC projects was funded by JICA as a low-interest and long-term concessional loan. The funding pattern for each phase of the project sourced from the DMRC website is as set out in Table 2. Smooth flow of funds into DMRC enabled timely payment to vendors and ensured that the project was not delayed due to uncertainty in financing.

Table 2: Funding pattern for DMRC projects

	Phase I	Phase II	Phase III
JICA loan	60%	54.47%	48.57%
Equity from GoI	14%	16.39%	10.04%
Equity from GNCTD	14%	16.39%	10.04%
Loans from Union/States	5%	6.56%	13.39%
Grants from States	-	0.59%	10.62%
Property Development	7%	5.59%	7.34%

Another lesson came from the fact that the Calcutta Metro was not financially viable (Singh, 2002). The traffic earnings were inadequate to cover the operating expenses of the metro-rail system. This not only burdened the exchequer in the form of subsidies but also affected the public as the fare per trip that was charged had to be increased to sustain operations (Public Accounts Committee, 1989). Decrease in cash flow meant stalling of procurement of raw materials, and delays in payments to vendors.

The financial crunch faced by Calcutta Metro encouraged DMRC to generate revenue through non-conventional sources. DMRC adopted the examples of well-performing international metro-rail systems and sought to increase its non-farebox revenue. Table 3 below shows the revenue model of DMRC for 10 years (FY2011-FY2020) obtained from its annual reports. Revenue from traffic operations is categorised as fare-box revenue and revenue from real estate, consultancy and external projects are categorised as non fare-box revenue.

Table 3: DMRC Revenue Model (as percentage of total revenue)

Description	Fare revenue	Non fare revenue
FY20	65.49	34.51
FY19	62.92	37.08
FY18	55.22	44.78
FY17	45.69	54.31
FY16	53.35	46.65
FY15	60.34	39.66
FY14	55.74	44.26
FY13	62.93	37.07
FY12	65.74	34.26
FY11	65.05	34.95

On an average 58.49% of DMRC's revenue is from traffic operations (fare-box revenue) and 41.51% of the revenue is through other sources (non-fare box revenue). This is in line with international practice. For instance, the non-farebox revenue of some of the better performing metros in the world (in terms of ridership and network length), such as London, Singapore and Hong Kong, ranges from 25-60% of its total revenue. DMRC's capacity to source funds and remain financially viable has helped it to make timely payments to its contractors, repay its debts, and expand its network line.

Human capacity and technical know-how

Building human competence within the government is paramount to do procurement well. This includes both functional as well as technical competence. In India, the technical know-how to build metro-rail systems was lacking. The Calcutta metro was the first ever underground railway project undertaken in India. Despite this, global tenders were not invited for construction of the work. Neither the construction firms in the country nor the Railway Administration possessed the experience to construct underground structures for a rapid transit system. The lack of expertise led to frequent abandonment of works and changes in scope of work, resulting in huge financial implications in addition to time overruns (Public Accounts Committee 1989 and 1992). Thus, when the idea of a metro-rail system in Delhi was born, the need to rope in personnel with prior expertise and experience, such as, B.I. Singal and E. Sreedharan, was recognised.

Mr. B.I. Singal was the former Director General of the Institute of Urban Transport and the then Managing Director of RITES (Rail India Technical and Economic Service). Mr. Singal came in with 11 years of experience in the planning and building of some of the finest metro-rail systems in the world, such as the Hong Kong MTR (known for completing the project within time and budget) and Taipei metro-rail network. RITES prepared the feasibility study on building a metro-rail system for Delhi. Mr. Singal made sure that his RITES team had a few professionals who had previous experience of working with the Calcutta metro. Mr. E. Sreedharan, the first Managing Director of DMRC, had served as the Chairman and Managing Director of Konkan Railways. He brought in his domain experience of working with the Railways as well as the management experience of heading an autonomous entity. Studies document some effective practices adopted by Singal and Sreedharan which we speculate had an impact on the organisation's procurement practices. They insisted on independence in decision making, speed, and global exchange of knowledge and expertise (Ashokan, 2015; CPI, 2017). This resulted in creation of DMRC as a separate legal entity and in transfer of Japanese technology and know-how in building metro-rail systems.

After the failed attempt at indigenisation by the Calcutta metro, the authorities felt the need to tap in to global expertise for the Delhi metro project. In addition to funding from JICA, Japanese Consultants were also brought on board. This ensured transfer of foreign technological knowledge, skills and expertise to DMRC. DMRC engineers developed technical skills such as tunneling technologies, and functional skills such as management ethos, and value for time from their Japanese counterparts (Onishi, 2016). This enabled DMRC to build in-house capacity, which now helps other metro-rail networks in the country.

Discussion

Our work shows how the Indian state attempts to achieve better outcomes by identifying lessons from its past shortcomings. The challenges faced by the Calcutta metro shaped the Delhi metro's institutional design, financial structure, and human resource competence. Our article highlights the importance of these three factors in enabling desirable procurement outcomes.

A key insight from our analysis is that these factors do not work in isolation. Autonomy in decision making, efficient and experienced personnel, adequate financing, and right institutional choice are all inter-operable and go hand in hand. If a procuring entity seeks to realise better outcomes, procurement reforms must not merely pick the lowest hanging fruit of these factors. Instead, a sector-specific approach of studying the past experiences must be employed to act as feedback into future projects. Our research provides a framework to assess such past successes and failures, and demonstrates the potential of deploying such research.

References

Public Accounts Committee, Fifty-fifth Report, 1981, Hundred and Forty-second Report, 1989 and Ninth Report, 1991.

Standing Committee on Railways, Second Report, 1993 and Thirty-fourth Report, 2007.

Comptroller and Auditor General of India, Report No. Performance Audit 17, 2008.

Pavithra Manivannan, Lessons from the Delhi Metro, Business Standard, July 2021.

Anirudh Burman and Pavithra Manivannan, Timeliness in government contracting: Evidence from the country's largest metro-rail network, The Leap Blog, August 2022.

Yumiko Onishi, Breaking Ground: A Narrative on the making of Delhi Metro, JICA, 2016.

Centre for Public Impact, The Construction of the Delhi Metro, November 2017.

Saurabh Singhal, Non Farebox Revenue for Metro - A Global Perspective, Business World, May 2022.

The International Association of Public Transport (UITP), World Metro Figures, 2018.

M.S. Ashokan, Karmayogi - A biography of E. Sreedharan, Penguin, 2015.

Anirudh Burman is an Associate Research Director and Fellow at Carnegie India. Pavithra Manivannan is a Senior Research Associate at XKDR Forum and Chennai Mathematical Institute.