To strengthen the Supreme Court, divide it

As 2025 drew to a close, the court carried 92,318 pending cases, its heaviest backlog ever and nearly 10,000 more than a year earlier. File.

In 2016, three judges of the Supreme Court of India paused to ask a question about their own institution: had the apex court, established by the Constitution’s framers to safeguard the Republic’s foundational document, lost its way, drowning in ordinary appeals while its constitutional work withered? They framed 11 questions and referred it to a larger Bench. A decade later, the reference remains unheard. No emblem of the problem is sharper, nor any case for reform stronger: split the Supreme Court in two.

As 2025 drew to a close, the court carried 92,318 pending cases, its heaviest backlog ever and nearly 10,000 more than a year earlier. The caseload is growing at a pace that no reasonable enlargement of the Bench can outrun. The remedy is simple and not new: a lean Constitutional Court of about 11 judges in Delhi, hearing only constitutional cases and substantial questions of law, with four or five regional Courts of Appeal to handle the appeals that now flood the apex court. The idea is not to shrink the judiciary’s reach but to sort its work, so that questions shaping the Republic are not decided in the same queue as those shaping a single case.

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