Justice, and how long it takes

A case that takes eleven years to decide has been decided, in a sense, by the delay.

The National Judicial Data Grid publishes case pendency by court, by case type and by age of the case, updated continuously. It is a genuinely open administrative dataset and an unusually honest one.

Pendency counts alone say little, because a busy court and a slow court look similar. Disposal rate against fresh filings, and the age distribution of what is pending, separate the two.

What we measure

These are the indicators this topic is built from. Each names its source and the year that source refers to, because an official figure is not the same thing as a current one.

Indicator	Unit	Source and year
Cases pending	count, by court	National Judicial Data GridData year: 2026 (live)
Cases pending over five years	% of pending	National Judicial Data GridData year: 2026 (live)
Disposal rate against fresh filings	ratio	National Judicial Data GridData year: 2026 (live)
Judicial vacancies	% of sanctioned strength	Department of JusticeData year: 2026 (monthly vacancy statement)

What we publish

A district court dashboard with the age distribution of pending cases, not just the count.

The brief above is written and the sources are identified. What remains is the data build. Until it publishes, no figure for this topic appears anywhere on DataSpeaks — we would rather show nothing than show a placeholder.

Where these numbers come from

How we handle gaps

Where a source has not reported for a recent year, the gap is shown as a gap. We do not interpolate to make a series look continuous or a map look complete. Where two agencies publish different figures for the same thing, both appear and we say which is which.

Reuse

Charts from this topic may be reused with credit to DataSpeaks and to the original source named above. The underlying data remains under its own licence — most Government of India datasets permit reuse with attribution, some survey microdata does not.