Let's begin with the numbers, since the government's press release did not mention them.

 

The current number of judges in India is about 15 per million population. The Law Commission had recommended 50 judges per million people for the country in 1987, almost 40 years ago, to provide justice at a reasonable speed. The Supreme Court itself set the benchmark in 2002, to be met within five years. We are now in 2026, and the ratio is not 50 but 22. The addition of four judges to the top court changes that by an amount that is too small to measure. In the district courts, which have 49 million of India's 55.8 million pending cases, the average judge has 2,200 cases on their plate. That figure rises to 15,000 cases per judge in the Allahabad and Madhya Pradesh High Courts. The number of the Supreme Court's pending cases, 93,000-plus, is serious, but it is less than 0.2 percent of the country's pending cases. Not reforming the top, while leaving the base intact, is not solving the problem. It is optics.

 

The government's justification, which is that more judges will lead to more benches and quicker disposal, is sound on its own. History does not play ball with that reasoning. In 1986, the pendency of cases in the Supreme Court increased to 1,38,190 when its strength was increased from 18 to 26. It was increased to 31 in 2008 (effective from 2009), when pendency dropped to 45,887, which is a significant improvement, but not necessarily due to the number of judges. In 2019, when the strength was raised to 34, pendency stood at 59,695. It now has more than 93,000 pending cases. The path is not an expanding solution to the problem, but an expanding problem that outstrips every attempt to expand. In one year (March 2025 – March 2026), more than 12,000 new cases were added to the Supreme Court's docket.

 

There's something else here to be looked at, something that's not getting much attention in this round of congratulatory commentary. Parliament determines the size of the Supreme Court, and it has no restriction on its power. Article 124(1) of the Constitution says the court shall consist of the Chief Justice and as many other judges as Parliament may by law prescribe. No need to go to the courts, no independent body to decide when it is right to fill the posts, no obligation to do so once they are established. The executive determines the size of the court, when it expands, and how much, and when appointments are made.

 

This final component is of special interest. Strength and working strength are two different concepts in Indian courts, and there is no coincidence in the difference. Currently, the High Courts in the country have 371 vacancies, while the sanctioned strength is 1,122.33% of the jobs are vacant. The Punjab and Haryana High Court has 58 sitting judges on its rolls, while its sanctioned strength is 85. It's not a staffing issue. It is a structural aspect of a system in which the executive determines the speed (or slowness) of collegium recommendations and appointments. In 2015, the Supreme Court declared the National Judicial Appointments Commission unconstitutional, thus affirming the primacy of judicial appointments as a part of the basic structure of the Constitution. It could not stop the government's behind-the-scenes authority to hold on to names for months, even years, until they drop out of the race or until the situation changes.

 

The government has just given itself four new levers to play with in the composition of the Supreme Court, with the four new sanctioned posts, albeit with no binding timeline for filling them. It's not a conspiracy theory. It's the history of executive-judiciary relations that has been documented in this country.

 

The 18th Law Commission, in a report that collects the dust of inconvenient recommendations, had something more imaginative than just adding judges to a single bench in Delhi. It suggested the establishment of a permanent Constitution Bench in the capital and four regional cassation benches, in Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, and Mumbai, to adjudicate appeals from High Courts. Such a system would relieve the Supreme Court of the burden of serving as a second court of appeal for all of the nation's conflicts, spread the load, and make it easier for litigants in far-flung states to reach the Court. A huge number of the court's pending cases are Special Leave Petitions (SLPs), which ought to have been finally resolved at the High Court stage in a properly functioning court system. No matter how many new judges are appointed in a courtroom in New Delhi, the problem will not be solved until the court's jurisdiction is rationalized at the same time.

 

Last week, Chief Justice Surya Kant was asked if 38 is enough; he said it was a "policy matter”. That answer, though carefully worded, was more than it was meant to be. The court has a sense of what it requires. It is aware that it is more important to fill vacancies in the existing courts, establish functional infrastructure in the subordinate courts, reform the listing process, and rationalize the number of SLPs than to change the number of gazette notifications. But the reforms need the real co-operation of the executive, not merely the approval of a Bill which makes headlines without any political price.

 

But this is not to say that the expansion of the Supreme Court is a bad thing, as it is. It is not. The number of judges in India is very low, well below the recommended ratio and that of other democracies, and any principled opposition to expansion would be irresponsible. There are 150 judges per million in the U.S., and 220 judges per million on average in Europe. The four judges added to the top court in that context is not a bold reform, as 5.58 crore cases are pending across the system. This was the least that could be expected in arithmetic.

 

What India needs is a Judicial Reforms Act that is comprehensive, time-bound, enforceable, has regional benches, limits the number of government cases that are routinely appealed without merit (the government is the single largest litigant in Indian courts, accounting for about 50% of pending cases), and invests in the district judiciary, the real problem zone. 

 

The saying ‘Justice delayed is justice denied' is the oldest cliché in the Indian legal discourse and is trite. But there are people behind the platitude: undertrial prisoners who have spent more time in jail than they might have received in punishment; contract workers who have waited years for a labour court order; families who have seen land disputes carried on through generations. Four new judges in the apex court are not the solution they are looking for.

 

The Supreme Court is not broken due to the absence of four additional judges. It has long suffered from a lack of structural reform; executive cooperation is limited, and the court is so vast that it is the court of last resort for virtually any grievance in a nation of 1.4 billion people. That will require political will, which is not evident in Cabinet press briefings. It requires the challenging task of institutional reform, time limits on appointments, a regional rebalancing of the burden of appeals, serious consideration of the government as a litigant, and investment in the courts where most Indians, if any, will ever go to court.

 

Meanwhile, the unbearable burden of saving the judiciary will continue to rest on India’s judges, while the system that truly needs reform remains untouched.