Illuminating Judicial Productivity in India’s District Courts: An Empirical Analysis

[with Chiranjib Bhattacharya, Himanshu Payal]

Studies on court administration in India have so far focussed their attention largely on caseload management and judge strength of the higher judiciary. An in-depth investigation of the productivity of India’s lower courts, the primary loci of a citizen’s contact with the judiciary, remains missing. We conduct a novel, quantitative analysis of a large dataset of more than 1700 district courts across India between 2010 and 2018, to measure court productivity through the metric of case disposal. We specifically took Median Days to Decision (‘MDD’) — the number of days it takes for a district court in India to decide a case. We aim to understand the impact of well-established factors – working strength and tenure of judges, case administration, age distribution of cases, and category or case type – on this measure of district court productivity.

Our overall results show that there is a huge variation in productivity across district courts in the country. We find that court type and nature of cases are important predictors of a district court’s productivity. Specifically, (1) the nature of cases filed before the courts bears a stronger impact on a district court’s productivity than the total number of cases adjudicated before that court – this includes the informal categorisation of cases by judges as an ‘easy’ or hard case’, and the case management process used by a district court. Quality, not the extent of judicial time spent, is an important marker of court productivity; (2) Indian district courts, regardless of productivity levels, are characterised by a significantly low number of judges; (3) total number of judge working days and average bench strength are not good indicators of court productivity- the workload per judge being actually lower in district courts with lower productivity, compared to those with higher productivity; (4) applying the MDD test, overall, the principal district and sessions courts are more productive than the chief judicial magistrate courts.