Ask a litigant who makes the rules of the contest they are fighting and the answers come quickly and wrongly. The Constitution is named, as if a single text of 1950 settled how many judges hear a case, what fee a plaint carries, who may stand up and argue, and what happens to a party who disobeys the order at the end of it. Almost none of that is in the Constitution. The laws that shape India’s courts are a layered construction in which the constitutional text builds the frame, ordinary statutes supply most of the working parts, and the courts themselves write a large share of the procedure they follow. A reader who cannot say which layer answers a given question will look for the answer in the wrong instrument, quote the wrong authority, and misunderstand why reform proposals so often fail: they are addressed to a layer that does not control the question.

This guide maps that distribution of authority. Its claim is simple enough to state in one sentence and large enough to organise everything that follows. The Constitution establishes the courts and leaves almost everything about how they work to ordinary legislation and to judicial rule making, so the sanctioned strength of the Supreme Court is fixed by an ordinary Act, the procedure of every court is fixed partly by code and partly by rules the courts make for themselves, the qualification to appear before a court is fixed by a statute administered by the legal profession, and the method of appointing judges to the higher courts is fixed by neither a statute nor the constitutional text but by judicial construction laid over both. The working of the Indian judicial system is therefore determined almost entirely outside the constitutional text that creates it, and each section of this guide identifies the instrument that governs one part of that working.

The map matters because the public argument about the judiciary is conducted almost entirely at the level of outcomes: delay, vacancies, appointments, arrears. Outcomes are the product of instruments, and instruments can be read. When a litigant asks why a suit costs what it costs, the answer sits in a State court fees statute, not in the Constitution. When an aspirant asks who appoints a district judge, the answer sits in Articles 233 and 234 and in State rules, not in the debates about the collegium. When a government proposes a reform, the first question is always the same: which instrument would have to change, who controls that instrument, and what majority or process does the change require. A national service for the district judiciary, for example, has been constitutionally possible since 1976 and has never been created, because the instrument required is an ordinary Act preceded by a Rajya Sabha resolution and no Parliament has chosen to pass it. That single example contains the whole argument of this guide in miniature.

A note on method before the map itself. Figures about the judicial system are quoted loosely in public discussion, stripped of the level of court, the class of case and the period they belong to, and this guide follows a stricter discipline: every figure is attributed to a named source and a period, pending matters are described as pending, and contested questions, on which the judiciary and the executive have taken publicly opposed positions, are stated in the terms each side uses for itself. The appointments question and the tribunal question have their own specialist articles in this series, and this guide states their architecture and links to them rather than re-arguing them.

The constitutional layer: what the text itself settles

Parts V and VI of the Constitution do a short list of things and decline to do everything else. Article 124 establishes the Supreme Court of India and provides that it shall consist of a Chief Justice of India and, until Parliament by law prescribes a larger number, not more than seven other judges. The qualifying phrase is the whole story in embryo: the founding text fixed a starting size of eight and handed the number itself to ordinary legislation. Article 214 provides that there shall be a High Court for each State, and Article 216 leaves the composition of each High Court to a different mechanism again, a Chief Justice and such other judges as the President may from time to time deem it necessary to appoint, so the strength of a High Court is an executive determination made in consultation with the judiciary rather than a figure in any statute. Two courts at the top of the same system thus have their sizes fixed by two different instruments, one legislative and one executive, and neither figure can be found in the Constitution.

Below the High Courts, Chapter VI of Part VI distributes power over the subordinate judiciary between the Governor, the High Court and the State Public Service Commission. Article 233 provides that appointments of persons to be district judges in a State shall be made by the Governor in consultation with the High Court, and that a person not already in the service of the Union or of the State is eligible only if that person has been an advocate or a pleader for not less than seven years and is recommended by the High Court. Article 234 provides that appointments to the judicial service other than district judges shall be made by the Governor in accordance with rules made after consultation with the State Public Service Commission and the High Court. Article 235 then vests control over district courts and courts subordinate to them, including postings, promotion and leave of judicial officers, in the High Court. The design is deliberate and worth reading slowly: the State executive formally appoints, the High Court controls, and the constitutional text says nothing about examinations, syllabuses or training, all of which live in State rules framed under these articles.

The jurisdiction provisions are equally structural. Article 32 empowers the Supreme Court to issue writs for the enforcement of fundamental rights and makes the right to move the Court itself a fundamental right. Article 226 gives every High Court the wider power to issue writs both for fundamental rights and for any other purpose. Article 141 provides that the law declared by the Supreme Court shall be binding on all courts within the territory of India, which is the textual foundation of precedent in a system that otherwise leaves precedent’s mechanics to practice. Article 142 empowers the Supreme Court to pass such decree or make such order as is necessary for doing complete justice in any cause or matter pending before it, a power with no counterpart for other courts. Articles 129 and 215 declare the Supreme Court and every High Court to be courts of record with power to punish for contempt of themselves, a phrase whose consequences are taken up in the contempt section below. Article 50, in the directive principles, directs the State to separate the judiciary from the executive in the public services, the instruction that drove the separation of judicial and executive magistracy under the criminal procedure codes.

What the constitutional layer does not contain is as instructive. It fixes no procedure for any court beyond fragments. It prescribes no court fee. It sets no limitation period. It does not define who may practise law. It creates no tribunal, though Articles 323A and 323B, inserted by the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976, empower legislatures to create them. It says a judge of the Supreme Court is appointed by the President after consultation with such judges as the President may deem necessary, with consultation with the Chief Justice of India mandatory for appointments other than the Chief Justice’s own, and it does not use the word collegium anywhere. Nearly every operational question a citizen can ask about a court is therefore routed by the constitutional text itself to some other instrument, and the rest of this guide follows those routings one by one.

Can Parliament change the size of the Supreme Court without amending the Constitution?

Yes. Article 124(1) fixes only the starting composition, a Chief Justice and not more than seven other judges until Parliament by law prescribes a larger number. The number since then has been whatever the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Act, 1956 says it is, and Parliament has raised it by ordinary amendment six times without touching the constitutional text.

The distinction between what the Constitution fixes and what it delegates runs through every institution in this field. The retirement ages are constitutional, sixty five years for a Supreme Court judge under Article 124(2) and sixty two for a High Court judge under Article 217, raised from sixty by the Constitution (Fifteenth Amendment) Act, 1963. Tenure protection is constitutional: a judge holds office during good behaviour in substance, removable only by the address procedure in Article 124(4). Salaries are constitutional in their protection, charged on the Consolidated Fund and not votable, but statutory in their amount, as the composition section below explains. Even the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction is partly delegated: Article 134A and Article 138 allow Parliament to enlarge the Court’s jurisdiction by law, and Article 139 allows Parliament to confer writ power on the Supreme Court for purposes beyond fundamental rights, a power Parliament has never exercised. The framers built a court whose shell is entrenched and whose capacity is legislative, which is why arguments that treat every feature of the Court as constitutionally frozen misread the document.

The Supreme Court’s jurisdictions in operation

The constitutional layer section states that the Supreme Court exists and what its word is worth; this section records the doors through which work reaches it, because the Court’s jurisdiction is not one power but a bundle, and each door is shaped differently. A matter may arrive as an original suit belonging to no other court, as an appeal carrying a certificate from a High Court, as a petition asking for special leave, as a review of the Court’s own order, or as a question the President sends without any litigant at all. The distinction is not pedantry. A party can enter only through a door that fits the case, the tests at each door differ, and popular commentary on the Court persistently confuses them, describing a special leave petition as if it were an ordinary third appeal or an advisory opinion as if it were a judgment between parties. The text repays being read door by door.

Article 131 gives the Court original and, within its field, exclusive jurisdiction over disputes between the Government of India and one or more States, between the Government of India and any State or States on one side and one or more other States on the other, and between two or more States, insofar as the dispute involves a question of law or fact on which the existence or extent of a legal right depends. Such a suit is tried by the Supreme Court at first instance, making the Court the trial forum of the federation for quarrels between its units. The door is narrower than it looks. The proviso to the article takes out disputes arising from treaties and agreements made before the Constitution and continuing in operation, and Parliament may exclude other fields, as it has done for inter-State water disputes, which Article 262 routes to tribunals under the Inter-State Water Disputes Act, 1956. A State’s complaint that a central law invades its rights therefore has to be examined for its real character: a federal dispute about the State’s own legal rights belongs under Article 131, while a challenge that belongs to any affected citizen travels by writ, and the boundary between the two has itself been litigated.

The appellate doors are defined by Articles 132 to 134 and gated by certificates and categories. Article 132 admits an appeal from a judgment, decree or final order of a High Court, in a civil, criminal or other proceeding, where the case involves a substantial question of law as to the interpretation of the Constitution. Article 133 admits civil appeals where the case involves a substantial question of law of general importance which, in the High Court’s opinion, needs to be decided by the Supreme Court. Article 134 admits criminal appeals in defined and deliberately narrow classes, including cases where the High Court has on appeal reversed an acquittal and sentenced the accused to death, cases the High Court withdrew for trial before itself and ended in a death sentence, and cases the High Court certifies as fit for appeal. Article 134A, inserted by the Constitution (Forty-fourth Amendment) Act, 1978, governs the certificate itself, requiring the High Court to consider it as soon as may be after the judgment against which appeal is sought. Over this constitutional appellate structure the statutes lay a further set of doors: several sectoral Acts carry appeals from appellate tribunals and commissions directly to the Supreme Court, so the Court’s appellate load is fixed partly by the Constitution and partly by ordinary legislation creating forums below it, one more instance of the guide’s central distribution at work. Article 138 completes the position by empowering Parliament to enlarge the Court’s jurisdiction by law, a power distinct from the certificate route and exercisable without amendment of the text.

Article 136 is the door that explains the docket. The Supreme Court may, in its discretion, grant special leave to appeal from any judgment, decree, determination, sentence or order in any cause or matter passed or made by any court or tribunal in the territory of India, the sole textual exception being judgments of the armed forces tribunals. No party can claim special leave as a right; the Court first decides whether to grant leave, and only on grant does the petition convert into an appeal. The jurisdiction is residuary and deliberately uncanalised, which is why it supplies the largest single class of filings before the Court and why it reaches orders, interlocutory and final, that no appellate provision covers. The self-discipline of the jurisdiction is stated in the case law rather than the text: leave is for grave injustice, for questions of general importance, and for departures from settled principle, not for re-arguing findings of fact because two courts below took one view and the petitioner prefers another. A reader who grasps Article 136 grasps why the apex court of a country of this size spends so much of its sitting time at the admission stage, deciding which of the matters knocked at its door will be let in.

Two further doors open inward and outward respectively. Article 137 empowers the Court to review any judgment pronounced or order made by it, subject to any law made by Parliament and to the rules it frames under Article 145; review lies on narrow grounds, an error apparent on the face of the record being the working formulation, and it is not an appeal in disguise. Even review is not the last word. In Rupa Ashok Hurra v Ashok Hurra (2002) the Court recognised the curative petition, a judge made remedy available after a review petition has been dismissed, designed to prevent abuse of the Court’s process and to cure a gross miscarriage of justice; the safeguards are strict, a senior advocate must certify the petition, and it is heard by a bench of the three senior most judges together with the judges who passed the judgment under challenge, if they are available. Article 143 opens the outward door: the President may refer to the Court a question of law or fact which has arisen or is likely to arise and which is of such public importance that it is expedient to obtain the Court’s opinion, and the Court may, after such hearing as it thinks fit, report its opinion. References across the decades, on the Kerala Education Bill in 1958, on the Berubari Union in 1960, on the Special Courts Bill in 1979 and on spectrum allocation in 2012, show the door used for questions no lis had framed; in 1994 the Court returned one reference unanswered, a reminder that the advisory door is the Court’s to open or to leave shut, and that an advisory opinion binds as authority of great weight without being a decree between parties. Article 142, recorded in an earlier section, and Article 144, which obliges all authorities, civil and judicial, in the territory of India to act in aid of the Supreme Court, supply the enforcement spine behind every one of these doors.

Composition and service conditions: the statutes that build the bench

The Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Act, 1956 (Act 55 of 1956) is four sections long and does exactly one thing: it prescribes the maximum number of judges other than the Chief Justice. As enacted it prescribed ten, producing a court of eleven. The amendment of 1960 raised the number to thirteen, the amendment of 1977 to seventeen, the amendment of 1986 to twenty five, the amendment that took effect in 2009 to thirty, and the amendment of August 2019 to thirty three, producing a sanctioned strength of thirty four including the Chief Justice. Each increase was an ordinary Act passed by simple majority, debated as court administration rather than as constitutional change, and justified in Parliament by the arrears position of the day. The most powerful court in the system owes its size to the least entrenched instrument in the field, and reform proposals that speak of expanding the Court as if a constitutional amendment were required begin from an error.

The High Courts stand on the opposite footing. No statute prescribes their strength. Under Article 216 the President determines the number of judges of each High Court from time to time, and the working strength of every High Court is the product of a continuing administrative process in which the Department of Justice in the Union Ministry of Law and Justice maintains the sanctioned strength of each court, revised periodically on proposals that move between the High Court, the State government and the Union government. The sanctioned strengths of the High Courts together exceed eleven hundred posts on the Department of Justice’s published figures, and the gap between sanctioned strength and working strength at that level is the vacancy problem in its largest form. The contrast is a small lesson in institutional design: the legislature fixed the size of the court whose size changes rarely, and the executive administers the size of the courts whose sizes change constantly.

Pay and conditions follow the same pattern of constitutional protection and statutory content. Article 125 provides that Supreme Court judges shall be paid such salaries as Parliament may by law determine, and that privileges, allowances and rights in respect of leave and pension shall not be varied to a judge’s disadvantage after appointment. Article 221 does the same for High Court judges. The statutes are the Supreme Court Judges (Salaries and Conditions of Service) Act, 1958 (Act 41 of 1958) and the High Court Judges (Salaries and Conditions of Service) Act, 1954 (Act 28 of 1954). A joint amendment Act of 2018 revised the salary figures with effect from 1 January 2016, fixing the Chief Justice of India at two lakh eighty thousand rupees a month, a judge of the Supreme Court and the Chief Justice of a High Court at two lakh fifty thousand, and a judge of a High Court at two lakh twenty five thousand. These figures are quoted because they demonstrate the mechanism rather than because they are large: the salary of the highest judge in the country is a line in an ordinary statute, alterable by Parliament, protected only against disadvantageous variation for a sitting judge and by the charging of the amount on the Consolidated Fund under Articles 112 and 202, which removes it from the annual vote.

The same pair of statutes governs leave, pension, medical facilities and the like, and their amendment history tracks the general revision of government pay after each pay commission. Around them sits a small family of related instruments: the Judges (Protection) Act, 1985, which shields judicial officers from civil and criminal proceedings for acts done in the discharge of judicial duty, and the Supreme Court and High Court rules on matters the statutes leave open. Service conditions are the least contested part of the judicial architecture, and they are instructive for that reason: where the instrument is a statute and the political cost of amendment is low, the law changes in step with the rest of the public services without controversy. The parts of the system that generate constitutional argument are precisely the parts where the instrument is unclear, and no part is less clear than the one governing discipline and removal, to which the next section turns.

Where the Supreme Court sits: Article 130

One constitutional sentence decides where the apex court is, and it has never been displaced. Article 130 provides that the Supreme Court shall sit in Delhi or in such other place or places as the Chief Justice of India may, with the approval of the President, from time to time, appoint. The decision is therefore neither purely judicial nor purely executive: the initiative belongs to the Chief Justice, the approval to the President, and no other seat has been appointed. The Court sits as a single court in Delhi, and its benches are divisions of one court, not branches of it, so a party’s papers, wherever in India the dispute arose, travel to one registry and one cause list. The contrast with the High Courts is structural. Several High Courts sit at a principal seat with permanent benches elsewhere in the State, created under the States reorganisation legislation and later notifications, and a litigant’s forum within the State depends on which districts a bench’s territorial roster covers. No equivalent dispersion exists at the apex level, and the fact is a deliberate feature of the 1950 settlement rather than an oversight: a single seat was meant to give the federation one visible court of final appeal, speaking with one voice under Article 141.

The case for regional benches has been made repeatedly and has repeatedly stopped at the same two obstacles. Distance is the litigant’s argument: a petitioner from the far south or the north east bears the cost of Delhi counsel, Delhi travel and Delhi adjournments for a court whose docket is dominated by admission stage petitions, and access to the final court is measurably unequal across the map. Unity is the institution’s argument: benches sitting permanently in several cities would risk divergent answers to identical questions until a larger bench resolved them, would multiply the administrative machinery of registries and rosters, and would dilute the collegial character of a court whose authority rests partly on being one body. The Law Commission’s 229th Report of 2009 proposed a middle design, a Constitution Bench sitting in Delhi to hear constitutional and allied questions and cassation benches in the regions for the ordinary appellate load, and examined whether Article 130 itself could carry the change or a constitutional amendment would be needed. The proposal was not adopted. The seat question is recorded in this guide because it illustrates the map’s logic in miniature: the text fixes the mechanism, the mechanism requires a concurrence of the two heads of two organs, and in the absence of that concurrence the arrangement of 1950 continues by default, defended and criticised in the same terms across the decades.

Removal and discipline: the Judges (Inquiry) Act 1968

Article 124(4) provides that a judge of the Supreme Court shall not be removed except by an order of the President passed after an address by each House of Parliament, supported by a majority of the total membership of that House and by a majority of not less than two thirds of the members present and voting, presented in the same session, on the ground of proved misbehaviour or incapacity. Article 124(5) then provides that Parliament may by law regulate the procedure for the presentation of an address and for the investigation and proof of the misbehaviour or incapacity. That law is the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968 (Act 51 of 1968), which came into force on 1 January 1969. Article 217(1) applies the same removal mechanism to High Court judges by reference, so a single statute operates the discipline of the entire higher judiciary. No other statute in the judicial field carries as much constitutional weight on as little machinery.

The Act’s procedure is exact. A motion for an address may be admitted only if notice is given by not less than one hundred members of the Lok Sabha or fifty members of the Rajya Sabha. If the Speaker or the Chairman admits the motion, a committee of three is constituted: one person chosen from among the Chief Justices and judges of the Supreme Court, one from among the Chief Justices of the High Courts, and one person who is, in the opinion of the Speaker or Chairman, a distinguished jurist. The committee investigates the charges under the Act’s provisions on evidence and procedure, frames definite charges where the material warrants them, and reports whether the charges stand proved. If the committee finds the judge not guilty, the motion falls. If it finds the judge guilty of misbehaviour or suffering from incapacity, the motion proceeds to the vote Article 124(4) prescribes, and the address follows only if both Houses carry it in the same session by the double majority.

The record of the Act is part of its meaning. The procedure has been set in motion a handful of times in over five decades, and no judge has been removed through it. One motion, in 1993, failed in the Lok Sabha because the voting did not produce the majority of total membership the Constitution requires even though the committee had reported charges proved. In another proceeding, in 2011, a judge of a High Court resigned after the Rajya Sabha had adopted the motion and before the Lok Sabha voted. Two further features of the architecture deserve notice. The first is that the Act deals only with the two grounds the Constitution names, misbehaviour and incapacity, and provides no lesser sanction: the system offers a judge’s conduct one destination, removal, or none at all, a design that reform commissions have repeatedly criticised for leaving no intermediate response to misconduct that falls short of the removal threshold. The second is that complaints against judges which do not enter this statutory channel are handled, if at all, through an internal procedure the judiciary evolved for itself in the late nineteen nineties, resting on a resolution of a conference of Chief Justices and on the Restatement of Values of Judicial Life adopted in 1997, neither of which is law. The discipline of the higher judiciary is thus governed by a statute that has never completed its course and an internal code that is not a statute at all, and a reader who wants to know what happens to a complaint against a High Court judge will find the formal answer in the Act of 1968 and the working answer in a body of institutional practice that no legislature enacted.

The procedure codes: how a case moves

If the Constitution builds the frame and the service statutes the bench, the procedure codes are the system’s operating instructions, and they are ordinary statutes of the most workaday kind. The Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 (Act 5 of 1908) governs the civil side. Its architecture is itself a lesson in the layering this guide describes: the body of the Code contains the substantive principles, jurisdiction, parties, res judicata in Section 11, stays, interim orders and appeals, while the First Schedule contains the Orders and rules that prescribe the daily mechanics of pleadings, summons, discovery, issues, trial and execution. The distinction matters because Section 122 empowers the High Courts to annul, alter or add to the rules in the First Schedule for their own courts and the courts subordinate to them, after previous publication and through rule committees constituted under Section 123. The civil procedure of a district court in one State is therefore the Act of 1908 as locally amended both by the State legislature acting on a concurrent subject and by the High Court acting under the Code itself, and a practitioner moving between States works with a shared skeleton and materially different local rules.

The criminal side ran for fifty years on the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 (Act 2 of 1974), which classified offences, organised the magistracy separated from the executive as Article 50 directed, and prescribed investigation, inquiry and trial. On 1 July 2024 the criminal codes of 2023 took over: the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (Act 45 of 2023) for the substantive penal law, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (Act 46 of 2023) for criminal procedure, and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (Act 47 of 2023) for the law of evidence, replacing respectively the Indian Penal Code, 1860, the 1973 Code and the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 (Act 1 of 1872), with savings for proceedings already under way under the repealed codes. The replacement was wholesale in form and largely continuous in substance, since long passages of the older codes were carried into the new ones with renumbering and selected changes. This series holds a comparison of the penal codes, and the reader who wants the old and new substantive law side by side should go to the comparison of the Indian Penal Code and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita; the point for this map is only that the procedural constitution of every criminal court in the country was re-enacted by Parliament in a single session, with no constitutional amendment, because procedure sits on the concurrent list and has never been entrenched.

Two comparisons discipline any claim about these codes. The first is with the indexing habit of treating procedure as an afterthought to rights: in practice the procedural code determines the real content of most substantive law, because it allocates the burden of proof through the evidence statute, sets the stages at which orders can be challenged, and prices delay through the law of adjournments, costs and interest. The second is between the civil and criminal sides of the same system. A civil suit is driven by the parties and paid for by them; a prosecution is driven by the State, and the procedural code’s protections run to the accused, bail, discharge, the requirement of proof beyond reasonable doubt that the evidence statute’s standards produce. Both sides share one further layer the professional reader forgets at peril: the rules of the individual court. The Supreme Court framed its own rules under Article 145, the Supreme Court Rules, 2013, with the approval of the President. Each High Court frames rules of practice under Article 225 and its Letters Patent or State Act inheritance, and under the codes themselves. The file that reaches a judge has passed through all three layers, statute, code and court rule, before a single question of merit is reached.

Who writes the rules a civil court follows each day?

Three authors share the work. Parliament wrote the body of the Code of Civil Procedure and can amend any of it. Each High Court may rewrite the First Schedule’s rules for the courts under it under Section 122 of the Code, and also frames practice rules under Article 225. The district judiciary then applies both, with local handbooks and circulars of the High Court settling the remainder.

The evidence statute deserves separate notice inside this section because it is the point where procedure controls substance most visibly. The Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, like the 1872 Act it replaced, is a code of relevance: it declares which facts may be proved, places the burden of proof in its chapters on the subject, and governs the examination of witnesses. A fact that the substantive law makes decisive and the evidence statute makes unprovable is, for the litigant, not a fact at all. The 2023 re-enactment enlarged the treatment of electronic records, whose certificates had generated a generation of appellate litigation under the older Act, and placed the certificate regime in a schedule to the statute. Critics of the new codes, in Parliament and outside it, made two architectural points that belong in this map: the re-enactment was an opportunity to restructure, and what was delivered was largely renumbering with select substantive changes; and the Hindi short titles chosen for codes that operate in English in most courtrooms created a durable layer of translation difficulty. Supporters answered that continuity was the design goal, that the changes made were the ones the system could absorb, and that a code the profession already knows is worth more than a theoretically cleaner one it does not. Both arguments are arguments about instruments, which is the level at which this guide works.

Limitation and court fees: the quiet gatekeepers

Two unglamorous statutes decide more outcomes than many celebrated ones. The Limitation Act, 1963 (Act 36 of 1963) prescribes the periods within which suits, appeals and applications must be brought, and Section 3 obliges a court to dismiss a proceeding instituted after the prescribed period even if limitation has not been pleaded as a defence. The Schedule runs from one year for suits relating to torts such as libel and malicious prosecution to three years for the ordinary run of contract, money and property claims, twelve years for suits for possession of immovable property, and thirty years for suits by or on behalf of the government. Section 5 permits courts to admit an appeal or application after the period for sufficient cause, a discretion that does not extend to suits and does not extend to applications under Order XXI of the civil procedure code. The Act extinguishes the remedy and, in the case of property, Section 27 extinguishes the right itself. For the map, the limitation statute is the clearest proof that the life of a right is statutory: the Constitution guarantees access to courts in the abstract, and an Act of 1963 decides, to the day, when that access closes.

Court fees are the second gatekeeper, and their federal character is the point the brief for this guide insists on being stated precisely. The Court Fees Act, 1870 (Act 7 of 1870) is a pre-constitutional statute that survives in some States in amended form, but court fees are not governed by a single Indian law and never have been in the republic’s working life. Entry 3 of the State List in the Seventh Schedule covers officers and servants of the High Court, procedure in rent and revenue courts, and fees taken in all courts except the Supreme Court, and on that footing most large States have enacted their own complete court fees and suits valuation legislation: the Tamil Nadu Court-fees and Suits Valuation Act, 1955, the Kerala Court Fees and Suits Valuation Act, 1959, the Karnataka Court Fees and Suits Valuation Act, 1958, and their counterparts elsewhere, alongside States that continue with the 1870 Act as locally amended, and separate fee regimes for the Supreme Court under the Supreme Court Rules. The ad valorem structure of the State Acts, under which the fee on a money or property suit rises with the value of the claim, subject in most States to caps only in limited classes, means that the price of the forum is a State legislative choice, and the same claim can carry a fee several times larger in one State than in another.

The suits valuation half of those Acts is not a formality. The valuation of a suit determines both the fee and, under the civil procedure code’s rules on pecuniary jurisdiction, which grade of court may try it, so a plaintiff’s valuation decision allocates the case within the system before any judge sees it. Overvaluation and undervaluation are policed by the court fee examiner machinery the State Acts create and by the court’s own power to require proper valuation. The policy argument over court fees is long running: fee income defrays part of the cost of the courts, yet fees set as a proportion of claim value operate as a tax on the size of a grievance and fall most heavily on middle value claims too large for indigence provisions and too small to absorb the charge comfortably. The civil procedure code contains the escape valve: Order XXXIII permits a person without means to sue as an indigent person with the fee deferred against the outcome. The gatekeeper statutes thus sit at the entrance of the system and are different law in different States, a federal patchwork that any account naming a single court fees Act for India would misdescribe.

The language of the courts

A map of the judicial system that omits language omits the medium in which every other instrument operates, and language, too, is distributed by layer. Article 348(1)(a) provides that all proceedings in the Supreme Court and in every High Court shall be in the English language until Parliament by law otherwise provides; Parliament has made no such law for proceedings. Article 348(1)(b) applies the same rule to the authoritative texts of Bills and Acts and to orders, rules, regulations and bye-laws issued under the Constitution or under any law. The appellate record of India is therefore an English record by constitutional direction, whatever language the evidence at trial was given in, and the translation of depositions and documents is a routine stage of every appeal that travels upward. Article 343, which makes Hindi in the Devanagari script the official language of the Union while continuing English for official purposes, governs the Union’s administration and does not displace Article 348 for the courts, a distinction that popular debate about court language frequently collapses.

Article 348(2) is the designed exception, and its conditions explain its narrow use. Notwithstanding the main rule, the Governor of a State may, with the previous consent of the President, authorise the use of Hindi, or any other language used for official purposes of the State, in proceedings in the High Court having its principal seat in that State; the proviso insists that nothing in the clause applies to any judgment, decree or order of the court, which remains in English. Acting on a Cabinet decision of 21 May 1965, which added the requirement of the Chief Justice of India’s consent to the process, authorisations for the use of Hindi in proceedings were given for the Rajasthan High Court in 1950 under the earlier arrangements and thereafter for the High Courts of Uttar Pradesh in 1969, Madhya Pradesh in 1971 and Bihar in 1972. Proposals from other States, for the use of Tamil, Gujarati, Odia, Kannada and other languages, have been considered through the same machinery, which routes them through the Chief Justice of India and the Supreme Court, and have not been accepted; the Ministry of Law and Justice has laid that position before Parliament in answer to questions on the subject. Section 7 of the Official Languages Act, 1963 supplies the companion power on the judgment side: the Governor, with the previous consent of the President, may authorise the use of Hindi or the official language of the State, in addition to English, for judgments, decrees and orders of the High Court, provided that any such judgment, decree or order is accompanied by a translation of it in English issued under the authority of the High Court. Argument in one language and judgment in another, with a statutory translation duty between them, is the compromise the instruments strike at the High Court level.

Below the High Courts the language rule is a State decision, as so much else in this guide is. Section 307 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, carrying forward Section 272 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, provides that the State Government may determine what shall be, for the purposes of the Sanhita, the language of each court within the State other than the High Court; the civil side rests on the parallel footing of the State’s declared language of subordinate courts under the Code of Civil Procedure. The district courtroom accordingly works in the State’s language for evidence and much of its record, while the forums above it work in English, and the litigant’s case changes language as it climbs. Article 350 adds the citizen’s own channel: every person is entitled to submit a representation for the redress of any grievance to any officer or authority of the Union or a State in any of the languages used in the Union or in the State, as the case may be. The architectural point closes the section. Language reform of the higher judiciary is not blocked by any single veto; it is routed through a constitutional provision, a parliamentary silence, a consent chain joining the Governor, the President and the Chief Justice of India, and a statute, and a proposal that addresses only one of those four addresses a quarter of the machine.

The profession: who may appear

A court system needs a law of the people who work in it, and in India that law is the Advocates Act, 1961 (Act 25 of 1961), with the articles on the higher judiciary linked at the end of this section. The Act consolidated the colonial patchwork of legal practitioners statutes, created the Bar Council of India and a State Bar Council for each State, and made enrolment with a State Bar Council the single gateway to practice. Section 24 prescribes the conditions of eligibility, centred on an Indian citizenship qualification, a minimum age of twenty one years and a degree in law from a recognised university, with Section 24A disqualifying persons convicted of offences involving moral turpitude for a period. Section 33 states the monopoly: except as otherwise provided in the Act or any other law, no person shall be entitled to practise in any court or before any authority unless enrolled as an advocate. Article 124(3) ties the two halves of the system together by making ten years of practice as an advocate of a High Court one of the qualifications for appointment to the Supreme Court, and Article 217(2) does the same for the High Courts.

The Act’s regulatory half is disciplinary. Chapter V empowers a State Bar Council to punish an advocate for professional or other misconduct, with punishments running from reprimand through suspension to removal of the name from the roll, and Section 37 carries appeals to the Bar Council of India and Section 38 onward to the Supreme Court. Section 49 empowers the Bar Council of India to make rules on training, on the conditions subject to which an advocate shall have the right to practise, on standards of professional conduct and etiquette, and on the disciplinary procedure of the councils. The Bar Council’s training rules have their own constitutional history: a rule requiring pre-enrolment training was struck down by the Supreme Court as beyond the Act’s rule making power, and a later attempt to impose an upper age limit on enrolment met the same fate, holdings that fix the boundary of the Council’s delegated power. The All India Bar Examination, conducted by the Bar Council as a condition of practice for graduates enrolled after a prescribed point, has been upheld as a permissible regulation of the right to practise rather than a barrier to enrolment, a distinction that matters to the tens of thousands of graduates who pass through the examination each year. Rules notified in 2022 opened a limited route for foreign lawyers and foreign law firms to register for non-litigious work in India, ending a position under which the Act had been read to confine all practice to enrolled advocates; litigation and appearance before courts remained reserved.

Who can punish an advocate for professional misconduct?

The State Bar Council that enrolled the advocate, through its disciplinary committee, with punishments from reprimand to removal from the roll under Chapter V of the Advocates Act. Appeals lie to the Bar Council of India and then to the Supreme Court. A court may report conduct to the council and may bar appearance in a case, but striking off is the council’s power alone.

The system’s treatment of vakils, pleaders and mukhtars inherited from the Legal Practitioners Act, 1879 was absorbed into the single category of advocate by the 1961 Act, and its remaining territorial exception, the separate arrangements the Act preserved for certain areas, has long since faded. For this map the profession’s statute completes the constitutional circuit: the Constitution prescribes who may be appointed a judge by reference to years spent as an advocate, the Advocates Act decides who counts as one, and the disciplinary chapters of the same Act police the conduct of the bar from which the bench is largely drawn and before which every court sits. The full working of the statute is the subject of the companion account of the Advocates Act 1961 explained, and this guide carries only its place in the architecture.

Access to justice: the legal services layer

Article 39A, inserted by the Forty-second Amendment, directs the State to secure that the operation of the legal system promotes justice and to provide free legal aid so that no citizen is denied the opportunity of securing justice by reason of economic or other disability. The operative statute is the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987 (Act 39 of 1987), which received assent in 1987 and was brought into force on 9 November 1995, a gap of eight years that itself says something about the priority the access layer received. The Act builds a four level machinery: the National Legal Services Authority, the State Legal Services Authorities, the District Legal Services Authorities and the Taluk Legal Services Committees, charged with giving effect to policies for legal services, conducting Lok Adalats, and running legal literacy programmes. Section 12 lists the persons entitled to free legal services, including a member of a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe, a victim of trafficking, a woman or a child, a person with disability, a person in custody, and persons whose annual income falls below the ceilings the Act and the State rules prescribe. Section 13 adds the merits test: the authority must be satisfied that the applicant has a prima facie case to prosecute or defend.

The Act’s second engine is the Lok Adalat. Sections 19 to 22 empower the authorities to organise Lok Adalats for cases pending in court and disputes at the pre-litigation stage, give them the powers of a civil court for summoning witnesses and documents, and provide in Section 21 that an award of a Lok Adalat, being a settlement, shall be deemed a decree of a civil court, final and binding, with no appeal. An amendment of 2002 inserted Chapter VI-A creating Permanent Lok Adalats for disputes relating to public utility services, transport, postal and telegraph, power, hospitals and insurance among them, with power, where settlement fails, to decide the dispute on merits, a significant departure from the consent basis of the ordinary Lok Adalat; their pecuniary jurisdiction was raised to one crore rupees by an amendment of 2015. The scale claimed for the Lok Adalat system in the authorities’ own reporting is large, with National Lok Adalats settling cases counted in crores in single years across categories from bank recovery to compoundable criminal matters, and the figure belongs to its source and period: these are the legal services authorities’ published returns, and they count settlements recorded, which includes pre-litigation matters and traffic challans alongside court referred cases.

The architecture point is that access law in India is a service statute rather than a rights code: it creates authorities, entitlements and settlement forums, and the entitlement to a lawyer at public expense in a criminal trial also draws support from the procedure code’s provision for pleaders at State expense where an accused is unrepresented, and from the constitutional case law that read legal aid into Article 21 in the late nineteen seventies. The machinery of the 1987 Act, and the entitlement structure that runs through it, is set out in the later article on the Legal Services Authorities Act 1987, to which this guide defers for the detail.

Leaving the courtroom: arbitration and mediation

Not every part of the system the courts supervise sits inside a courtroom. The Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 (Act 26 of 1996), modelled on the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration of 1985 and on the UNCITRAL Conciliation Rules, replaced the Arbitration Act, 1940 and the two foreign awards statutes, and assigned the courts a defined set of roles at the edges of a private process: appointment of arbitrators where the parties’ mechanism fails, interim measures, reference of court proceedings to arbitration where a valid agreement covers them, setting aside of awards on narrow grounds, and enforcement of awards as decrees. The 2015, 2019 and 2021 amendments, with their successive positions on time limits, institutional arbitration and the disqualifications of arbitrators, are the subject of the amendment trail article that follows this one in the series, and this guide carries the 1996 Act only as the point where the judicial system deliberately contracts its own role.

Conciliation under Part III of the same Act was for decades a little used facility. The Mediation Act, 2023 (Act 32 of 2023) placed mediation on a general statutory footing: it provides for pre-litigation mediation which parties may undertake voluntarily before filing, creates the Mediation Council of India as the sector’s regulator, prescribes the process and the duties of mediators, and makes a mediated settlement agreement enforceable as if it were a decree of court, subject to challenge on limited grounds including fraud and impersonation. Alongside the statutes sits a third channel created by the civil procedure code itself: Section 89, inserted into the Code with effect from 1 July 2002, empowers a court to refer a pending suit to arbitration, conciliation, judicial settlement including through Lok Adalat, or mediation, where the court sees elements of a settlement acceptable to the parties. The architecture is worth one clear statement. Alternative dispute resolution in India is not a system outside the courts; it is a set of statutory exits from the courts, signposted by the courts, supervised at the edges by the courts, and returning to the courts for enforcement, and its growth is a legislative decision about the allocation of the judicial system’s own caseload.

Specialised courts inside the system

Parliament and the State legislatures have repeatedly answered overload and specialisation with special courts, created by statute and staffed from the ordinary judicial cadres, and the guide treats them as rooms inside the house rather than annexes to it. The Family Courts Act, 1984 (Act 66 of 1984) obliges State governments to establish a family court for every city or town with a population exceeding one million, and empowers them elsewhere, for a defined list of matrimonial and family matters: nullity, restitution, judicial separation, divorce, maintenance, guardianship, custody and property disputes between spouses. The Act directs the court to attempt settlement first, permits it to take the help of counsellors and welfare agencies, relaxes the application of the evidence statute in Section 14, and originally denied parties representation by a legal practitioner as a matter of entitlement under Section 13, a restriction the courts read down in practice. Appeals lie to the High Court under Section 19, and no appeal lies from an order passed with the consent of the parties.

The Commercial Courts Act, 2015 (Act 4 of 2016) created Commercial Divisions in the High Courts exercising original jurisdiction and Commercial Courts at the district level for commercial disputes, a defined category running from ordinary transactions of merchants and bankers to intellectual property, insurance, joint ventures and agency, above a specified value which stood at one crore rupees at enactment and was reduced to three lakh rupees by the Amendment Act of 2018, which also inserted Section 12A requiring pre-institution mediation before a commercial suit may be filed where no urgent interim relief is contemplated. The Act overlays the civil procedure code with a stricter case management regime, including a case management hearing under the amended Code, compressed timelines for written statements, and costs provisions meant to price adjournment culture. Its detail belongs to the later article on commercial courts in this series; here it appears as the strongest example of forum specialisation within the ordinary hierarchy.

The Gram Nyayalayas Act, 2008 (Act 4 of 2009) took the opposite direction, downward in formality rather than upward in value. Enacted on the recommendation lineage of the Law Commission’s 114th Report of 1986, and brought into force on 2 October 2009, it empowers State governments to establish Gram Nyayalayas for a group of panchayats at the intermediate panchayat level or a group of contiguous panchayats, headed by a Nyayadhikari of the grade of a Judicial Magistrate of the first class, appointed by the State government in consultation with the High Court. The Gram Nyayalaya tries the criminal offences in the First Schedule and the civil claims in the Second, follows a summary procedure, is directed to attempt conciliation, and is relieved of strict adherence to the evidence statute, being guided instead by the principles of natural justice and the rules the High Court frames. Appeals lie to the Court of Session in criminal matters and to the District Court in civil matters. The institution’s record is one of the system’s persistent shortfalls: against plans framed in the thousands of courts when the centrally sponsored scheme was launched, the number actually notified and functioning has remained in the low hundreds on the Department of Justice’s own figures laid before Parliament, with many States not constituting them at all, citing cost, overlap with the existing subordinate courts and the absence of a cadre to staff them.

Is a Gram Nyayalaya a real court?

Yes. A Gram Nyayalaya is a court established under the Gram Nyayalayas Act, 2008, presided over by a judicial officer appointed in consultation with the High Court, exercising the criminal jurisdiction of a Judicial Magistrate of the first class over the scheduled offences and a defined civil jurisdiction. Its decrees and sentences are appealable to the District Court and the Court of Session respectively, like any other forum of that grade.

Alongside the three standing designs sits a shifting population of special courts under sectoral statutes, courts for offences under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes legislation, the narcotics statute, the child protection statute, and the Prevention of Corruption Act, designated judges of the ordinary courts trying a reserved class of cases, and the fast track courts created in rounds from the year 2000 on Finance Commission recommendations to clear the backlog of sessions cases, followed by fast track special courts for rape and child protection offences from 2019 under a centrally sponsored scheme. The special court device asks nothing of the Constitution, since constituting courts for particular classes of cases is ordinary legislative work under the concurrent entries for administration of justice and criminal procedure, and its rise records a standing judgment by legislatures that the generalist queue is the problem and a reserved queue is the cure. Whether the reserved queues move faster than the general one is a question the record answers unevenly; what is not in doubt is that specialisation has been the legislature’s chosen instrument far more often than expansion of the generalist cadre.

Contempt: the power that predates the statute

Articles 129 and 215 declare the Supreme Court and every High Court to be courts of record and vest them with all the powers of such a court including the power to punish for contempt of itself. The consequences of that wording are frequently missed. The power is constitutional in origin. It existed before any contempt statute, it survives independently of one, and the Supreme Court held in the Supreme Court Bar Association case of 1998 that the contempt jurisdiction under Article 129 is a constitutional power which cannot be abridged or taken away by statute. The Contempt of Courts Act, 1971 (Act 70 of 1971), enacted on the recommendations of the Sanyal Committee appointed in 1961, therefore regulates and channels a power it does not create. Its long title is exact about this: it is an Act to define and limit the powers of certain courts in punishing contempts of courts and to regulate their procedure in relation thereto.

The Act’s definitions carry its structure. Section 2(a) defines contempt of court as civil contempt or criminal contempt. Section 2(b) defines civil contempt as wilful disobedience to any judgment, decree, direction, order or writ of a court, or wilful breach of an undertaking given to a court. Section 2(c) defines criminal contempt as the publication of any matter, or the doing of any act, which scandalises or tends to scandalise or lowers the authority of any court, prejudices or interferes with the due course of any judicial proceeding, or interferes with the administration of justice in any other manner. The following sections carve out the protected ground: fair comment on the merits of a decided case, innocent publication, fair and accurate reporting of judicial proceedings, and complaints against subordinate judicial officers made in good faith to the High Court. Section 12 caps punishment at simple imprisonment for a term which may extend to six months, or fine which may extend to two thousand rupees, or both, with discharge or remission on an apology made to the satisfaction of the court. Section 20 sets a limitation period of one year. The Amendment Act of 2006 inserted into Section 13 the provision that no court shall impose a sentence for contempt unless satisfied that the contempt is of such a nature that it substantially interferes with the due course of justice, and permitted truth as a defence where the court is satisfied that it is in the public interest and the request to invoke it is bona fide.

Subordinate courts have no contempt power of their own under this Act; their protection runs through a reference by the subordinate court to the High Court under Section 10, which gives the High Court power to punish contempts of courts subordinate to it, and through the penal provisions on insult and obstruction in judicial proceedings. The depth treatment of this statute, its Sanyal Committee lineage and its case law is held by the later contempt article in this series. For the map, contempt is the limiting case of the whole argument: here alone does the working power of the system flow directly from the constitutional text, and the statute’s role is confined to definitions, defences, caps and procedure around a jurisdiction the legislature did not grant and cannot withdraw.

Tribunals: the layer beside the courts

Tribunals are the largest departure the system makes from its own template, and the only major layer created by constitutional amendment. The Forty-second Amendment of 1976 inserted Part XIV-A, containing Article 323A, which empowers Parliament to provide by law for the adjudication of disputes relating to recruitment and conditions of service of public servants by administrative tribunals, and Article 323B, which empowers the appropriate legislature to provide for tribunals for taxation, foreign exchange, industrial and labour disputes, land reforms, ceiling on urban property, elections, production and distribution of foodstuffs and rent and tenancy rights. Under Article 323A Parliament enacted the Administrative Tribunals Act, 1985 (Act 13 of 1985), creating the Central Administrative Tribunal and paving the way for State administrative tribunals, and the two articles are the constitutional footing of a population of specialist bodies that grew sector by sector: the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal, which is older than the republic and rests on the Income Tax Act, the National Green Tribunal under its Act of 2010, the National Company Law Tribunal under the Companies Act, 2013, the debt recovery tribunals under their Act of 1993, and the appellate bodies stacked above many of them.

The tribunal layer has never been allowed to detach from the courts it was built to relieve. In L. Chandra Kumar v Union of India (1997) a seven judge bench held that the power of judicial review over legislative action vested in the High Courts under Article 226 and in the Supreme Court under Article 32 is part of the basic structure of the Constitution, that the clauses in the tribunal statutes which excluded the jurisdiction of the High Courts were unconstitutional, and that decisions of tribunals would be subject to scrutiny by a division bench of the High Court within whose jurisdiction the tribunal falls. Tribunals, the Court held, could supplement the courts and could not supplant them. The conditions of the tribunal members themselves became the next battleground. In the Madras Bar Association line of cases the Supreme Court struck down the National Tax Tribunal Act in 2014 for transferring the High Courts’ jurisdiction to a body whose composition and conditions did not preserve judicial independence, and in 2020 and 2021 struck down and read down provisions of the tribunal rules and of the Tribunals Reforms Ordinance and Act governing tenure, age and selection, holding successive re-enactments to be impermissible where they reproduced provisions already invalidated. The Tribunals Reforms Act, 2021 (Act 33 of 2021) also abolished a set of appellate tribunals, including the Intellectual Property Appellate Board and the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal, transferring their work to the High Courts and the commercial courts, a legislative choice that moved cases back into the system the tribunals had been built to bypass. The settled position at the level of architecture is therefore a compound one: legislatures may create tribunals under Articles 323A and 323B and under their ordinary entries, but the product remains subject to the writ jurisdiction, the tribunal form is policed for independence by the courts, and the statute governing the sector, the Tribunals Reforms Act 2021 explained, sits inside that frame.

Are tribunals courts?

No, in the constitutional sense. A tribunal is a statutory adjudicatory body: it exercises the judicial power of the State, follows a procedure freed from the strict codes, and decides finally within its statute, but it is not a court established under Chapter V or Chapter VI of Part VI, its members are not judges of those courts, and its decisions remain subject to the writ and supervisory jurisdiction of the High Court and the Supreme Court.

The design question the tribunal debate circles is the one the guide’s architecture makes visible. A tribunal is an attempt to keep the output of adjudication while changing its inputs: specialist members instead of generalist judges, simplified procedure instead of the codes, executive administration instead of High Court control. Every element of that substitution has been litigated, and the resulting law is a negotiated boundary rather than a victory for either side. The appointments question, which decides in practice how independent any adjudicatory body is, arises inside the tribunal field in a statutory form that the rest of this series examines, and it arises for the courts themselves in a constitutional form that the next section states.

Appointments: the question the text does not answer

Article 124(2) provides that every judge of the Supreme Court shall be appointed by the President by warrant under hand and seal after consultation with such of the judges of the Supreme Court and of the High Courts as the President may deem necessary, provided that in the appointment of a judge other than the Chief Justice, the Chief Justice of India shall always be consulted. Article 217(1) applies a parallel consultation for High Court judges, with the Chief Justice of India, the Governor and the Chief Justice of the High Court. The text does not say whose view prevails when the consultees disagree, and the entire modern law of appointments is the judicial answer to that silence, given in three cases across two decades. In S. P. Gupta v Union of India (1981), the First Judges case, a majority read consultation as consultation and not concurrence, leaving the executive with the final word among the constitutional functionaries. In Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association v Union of India (1993), the Second Judges case, a nine judge bench read consultation as concurrence in this setting, held that the opinion of the Chief Justice of India, formed collectively with the two senior most colleagues, had primacy, and institutionalised the collegium. In the Presidential Reference of 1998, the Third Judges case, the Court enlarged the collegium for Supreme Court appointments to the Chief Justice and the four senior most judges, and prescribed consultation of judges conversant with the High Court concerned for High Court appointments.

Parliament and the executive replied once, at the constitutional level. The Constitution (Ninety-ninth Amendment) Act, 2014 inserted Articles 124A, 124B and 124C creating a National Judicial Appointments Commission, and the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act, 2014 (Act 40 of 2014) constituted a six member body, the Chief Justice of India, the two senior most Supreme Court judges, the Union Minister for Law and Justice and two eminent persons, to recommend appointments and transfers. In Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association v Union of India (2015), the NJAC judgment, a Constitution Bench by four to one struck down both the amendment and the Act as damaging the independence of the judiciary, itself a component of the basic structure, on the ground that the composition and veto structure of the Commission gave the executive and non-judicial members a controlling presence in a process where judicial primacy had to be preserved; the dissent would have upheld the Commission and indicted the collegium’s opacity in strong terms. The collegium system therefore continues, administered through a Memorandum of Procedure negotiated between the government and the judiciary, whose revision has been the subject of an inconclusive exchange between the two for a decade. The two positions are stated here as their holders state them. The judicial position is that primacy of the judiciary in appointments is a structural guarantee of independence, and that executive control over appointment is executive influence over adjudication deferred by a step. The executive position is that appointment by judges of judges is a democratic anomaly found in no comparable constitution, that the text assigns the appointment to the President, and that a system without a statutory basis, a secretariat or an obligation to record reasons cannot be defended on transparency grounds by the institution that demands transparency elsewhere. This guide adopts neither; it notes only the architectural fact that the single most consequential process in the system rests on interpretation, not on any instrument the legislature controls, and refers the reader to the cluster account in the NJAC Act and collegium judgment for the full record.

The subordinate judiciary, by contrast, appoints by text and by rule. District judges are appointed by the Governor in consultation with the High Court under Article 233, in practice from the higher judicial service examination and by promotion from the civil service cadre, and the remaining judicial service under Article 234 through the State public service commissions and the High Courts under State rules. The contrast between the two halves of one profession is complete: below the High Court, a rule bound, examination based public recruitment; at and above the High Court, a consultative process whose operative content is judge made. It is that contrast which gives force to the one structural proposal that has spent half a century in the space between the two halves, the subject of the next section.

The All India Judicial Service: the provision that was never used

Article 312 provides that if the Council of States declares by resolution supported by not less than two thirds of the members present and voting that it is necessary or expedient in the national interest to do so, Parliament may by law provide for the creation of one or more all India services common to the Union and the States. The Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976 inserted into Article 312 the words including an all-India judicial service, and added clause (3): the all India judicial service shall not include any post inferior to that of a district judge as defined in Article 236. The door has therefore stood open since 1976, deliberately constructed, with its threshold specified, and no Parliament has walked through it. No Bill to create the service has been introduced. The service exists in the Constitution as a possibility and in the policy debate as a standing exhibit, and the brief for this guide requires both cases to be stated in their holders’ terms.

The proposal’s ancestry is long. The Law Commission’s Fourteenth Report of 1958 recommended the creation of an all India judicial service to attract talent to the district judiciary and to equalise standards. The Sixteenth and later reports returned to it, and the Law Commission’s 116th Report of 1986 was devoted to the formation of the service, recommending a national examination, a common cadre, and district judges drawn from it. The Supreme Court, in the All India Judges’ Association litigation, directed the Union in 1992 to take steps towards establishing the service; on review in 1993 the Court modified its position and left the question to the decision of the government, where it has rested, taken up in consultations with the State governments and the High Courts by successive Union law ministries and never concluded.

The case for the service, as its proponents state it, runs as follows. Recruitment to the district judiciary is uneven across States: examinations are delayed, vacancies persist at levels that the Union government has repeatedly placed before Parliament in statements of the vacancy position State by State, and the quality of intake varies with the attractiveness of each State’s service. A national service on the pattern of the administrative and police services would carry an all India cadre’s advantages into the judiciary: a single competitive examination of national draw, common training, mobility across States that breaks local capture, and a career structure that raises the standing of the district bench from which High Court judges are increasingly drawn by promotion. Proponents add that the district judiciary decides the overwhelming majority of the country’s litigation and that the case for national standards is strongest exactly where the citizen actually meets the State.

The case against, as several State governments and some High Courts have stated it in the consultations the Union government has reported, runs as follows. District recruitment is a State function embedded in the constitutional scheme of Articles 233 to 235, under which the High Court controls the subordinate judiciary; a national cadre appointed by the Union would dilute that control and answer to a different master. A judge posted to a district whose language the judge does not speak, and whose local statutes, tenancy, land revenue, personal law usage and rent control regimes differ sharply from every other State’s, begins with a double handicap in the work that makes up most of the district docket. Promotion prospects of the State judicial services would be compressed by an incoming senior cadre, damaging the morale and the intake of the very services that staff the courts below the district level, to which Article 312(3) confines the new service’s exclusion. And the federal objection has a textual edge: Article 312 entrusts the initiative to the Council of States precisely because a common service alters the Union State balance, so the absence of a resolution is itself a constitutional datum, not merely inertia. The guide states the disagreement without resolving it: the provision is unused, the consultation process has not produced the consensus its design assumes, and the service remains the clearest example in the field of a reform whose obstacle is not constitutional capacity but the distribution of consent the Constitution requires.

Administering the courts: registries, rosters and officers

Behind the bench stands an administrative machine that no procedure code describes, and the Constitution assigns that machine to the head of each court. Article 146 provides that appointments of officers and servants of the Supreme Court shall be made by the Chief Justice of India or such other judge or officer of the Court as he may direct; the conditions of service of those officers and servants are prescribed by rules made by the Chief Justice, subject to any law made by Parliament, and rules relating to salaries, allowances, leave or pensions require the approval of the President; the administrative expenses of the Court, including the salaries and allowances of its officers and servants, are charged upon the Consolidated Fund of India. Article 229 writes the same design into every High Court: appointments by the Chief Justice of the High Court, conditions of service by rules of the Chief Justice subject to law made by the State legislature, rules on salaries, allowances, leave and pensions requiring the approval of the Governor, and the administrative expenses of the High Court charged upon the Consolidated Fund of the State. The registry that files a petition, scrutinises it for defects, lists it before a bench and preserves the record is thus staffed under the authority of the court’s own head, not of the executive whose departments litigate before the court, and the charge on the Consolidated Fund places the cost of that staff outside the annual vote. Administrative independence is built the same way judicial independence is built, by moving both the appointment and the money out of executive hands.

The head of the registry of the Supreme Court is the Secretary General, and below that office the registrars, additional registrars, joint registrars and deputy registrars run the judicial and administrative wings that handle filing, scrutiny, listing and records under the Supreme Court Rules, 2013. Each High Court has its Registrar General and a comparable hierarchy. The single most consequential administrative act in the system is the roster, the allocation of cases to benches, and its ownership is settled law. The Chief Justice is the master of the roster, with the exclusive prerogative of constituting benches and allocating cases to them; the Supreme Court restated the principle for itself in the Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms judgment of 2017 and again in Shanti Bhushan v Supreme Court of India (2018), and applied it to the Chief Justices of the High Courts through the line of authority running from State of Rajasthan v Prakash Chand (1998). On the judicial side the Chief Justice is first among equals, one vote in the bench; on the administrative side the Chief Justice alone constitutes the benches that hear everything, which is why litigation about the roster is litigation about institutional power and not about case management. One further body belongs in this section because it directs a part of court administration without belonging to any court: the e-Committee of the Supreme Court, constituted in 2004, which frames the national policy on computerisation of the judiciary and advises on the technology layer described in the pendency section, an advisory administrative organ created by the judiciary for itself rather than by statute.

Buildings, budgets and infrastructure

Courts sit in buildings, and the buildings are the least constitutional part of the system. The primary responsibility for the infrastructure of the district and subordinate courts, court halls, residential accommodation for judicial officers and the working establishment of courtrooms, rests with the State governments, in the same way as the subordinate judiciary’s daily governance does. Onto that State responsibility the Union has laid a Centrally Sponsored Scheme for the development of infrastructure facilities for the judiciary, administered by the Department of Justice and operating since the financial year 1993-94, which supplements State resources for the construction of court buildings and the residential accommodation of judicial officers in the district and subordinate judiciary. The scheme’s components have widened from court halls and residences to include lawyers’ halls, toilet complexes and digital computer rooms, and its funds are shared between the Centre and the States in a prescribed pattern, sixty to forty for most States, ninety to ten for the north eastern and Himalayan States, and the full amount for Union territories, with releases monitored through the Department’s Nyaya Vikas portal. The High Courts stand outside the scheme; their buildings and the Supreme Court’s are carried on the ordinary budgets of the Union and the State respectively, alongside the charged expenditure on judges and court staff recorded in the administration section.

The recurring proposal to lift this patchwork into an institution of its own has the same biography as the other reforms in this guide. In 2021 the then Chief Justice of India publicly proposed a National Judicial Infrastructure Corporation, a dedicated authority through which the Union and the States would fund and build court infrastructure to planned standards instead of through dispersed departmental budgets, and State level bodies on the same pattern. No statute created it, and infrastructure continues to be built the way the scheme and the budgets build it. The architecture of the position is worth stating because it explains a standing paradox of the system: the judiciary controls its rosters, its officers and, through Article 235, the postings of the district judiciary, but it does not control the capital budget that decides how many courtrooms exist, how many residences a district judge can be given, or whether a sanctioned court has a building to sit in. The sanctioned strength figures quoted in the composition and pendency sections are establishment figures; the infrastructure sections of this guide record who pays to make an establishment real, and the two ledgers, sanction and construction, are kept by different hands, which is itself one of the findings of the map.

Pendency: reading the backlog through the instruments

Pendency is where every layer of the architecture reports its results at once, and it is the field in which unattributed figures do the most public damage. The discipline this guide applies is that a pendency statement is incomplete without three coordinates: the level of court, the class of case, and the period. On those terms, the durable shape of the backlog, as recorded in the National Judicial Data Grid maintained under the eCourts project and in the Department of Justice’s statements to Parliament, is consistent across years: the subordinate courts carry the great bulk of the pending load, counted in crores of cases, civil and criminal together, with criminal matters forming the larger share; the High Courts together carry a load counted in lakhs; and the Supreme Court’s pendency is counted in tens of thousands against a sanctioned strength of thirty four. The Union Ministry of Law and Justice, answering in Parliament in 2022, placed the judge population ratio at roughly twenty one judges per million people, against the fifty judges per million that the Law Commission had recommended in its 120th Report of 1987, a report which also proposed breaking the long court vacations’ effect by increasing working days; the recommendation is quoted because the gap between it and the working ratio frames every other response.

The institutional responses map onto the layers. At the constitutional layer, the strength mechanism: presidential increases of High Court sanctioned strength and the 2019 enlargement of the Supreme Court, both administrative rather than textual. At the statutory layer, the special and fast track courts described earlier, the commercial courts’ case management regime, the Lok Adalat settlement engine, and the limitation and case management provisions inside the codes. At the administrative layer, the eCourts project itself, a centrally sponsored programme run in phases since 2007, which computerised the district courts and produced the National Judicial Data Grid as the public counting instrument of the system, the Case Information System from which cause lists, orders and case status flow, e filing, and the virtual courts for traffic and petty offences that dispose of compoundable matters without a physical hearing. At the personnel layer, the vacancy position is the standing qualification on all of it: a sanctioned strength in the subordinate judiciary on the Department of Justice’s published figures exceeding twenty thousand posts, with working strength materially lower, means the system’s rated capacity and its crewed capacity differ by the size of a large State’s entire judiciary.

Two cautions complete the section, both required by the brief’s attribution discipline. The first is that pendency aggregates unlike things: a traffic challan, a sessions trial, a forty year old partition suit and a service matter are one unit each in the headline count, and the age analysis the Grid publishes, which shows a long tail of cases older than five and ten years in the subordinate courts, is more informative than the total. The second is that disposal figures, which the Grid and the courts publish alongside institution figures, have exceeded institution in several recent reporting periods at several levels, so the stock figure is a balance of two moving flows and a statement of the stock alone misdescribes the direction of the system it purports to measure. What the architecture contributes to the problem is also plain enough to state: the instruments that could raise judge numbers fastest are the executive and legislative ones described in the composition section, the instrument that controls appointments has produced a chronic gap between sanctioned and working strength at the High Court level, and the instruments that control procedure sit in codes and court rules that the legislature and the courts amend on different clocks. Pendency is not one failure; it is the sum the layers produce, and it is assigned as seed question eight of this guide’s enquiry for a reason.

Open courts: publicity, reporting and the public record

The system’s default setting is publicity, and the setting, too, is fixed by instruments rather than by habit. Article 145(4) provides that no judgment shall be delivered by the Supreme Court save in open court, and that no report shall be made under Article 143 save in accordance with an opinion also delivered in open court. Section 153B of the Code of Civil Procedure declares that the place in which a civil court is held shall be deemed an open court, to which the public may generally have access so far as the place can conveniently contain them. The criminal codes carry the same rule for trials and inquiries, subject to the court’s power to exclude the public or a particular person at any stage. In Naresh Shridhar Mirajkar v State of Maharashtra (1967) the Supreme Court treated public trial as the rule of the system and upheld, at the same time, an inherent power in the court to hold proceedings away from the public in exceptional cases where publicity would defeat the ends of justice itself; the same judgment recognised that the press reports proceedings because it attends them, so the reporter’s right to publish a fair account rides on the public’s right to be present. The exceptions written into the statutes follow the pattern Mirajkar stated: proceedings under the statutes for sexual offences and the protection of children are held away from the public by direction, and the publication of matter connected with them is restricted, privacy in those classes being the price the open rule pays for witnesses who can speak at all.

Reporting what an open court does is protected by the contempt statute at the point where reporting meets liability. Sections 4 and 5 of the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971, treated in the contempt section of this guide, protect fair and accurate reports of judicial proceedings and fair comment on the merits of a case that has been heard and decided, so the journalist’s exposure begins where accuracy or fairness ends. The counterweight is the fair trial interest of a party in a pending matter, and in Sahara India Real Estate Corporation v Securities and Exchange Board of India (2012) a Constitution Bench recognised a narrow power in the constitutional courts to postpone publication of reports of proceedings for a limited period where a balance of probabilities showed a real risk of prejudice to a fair trial, framing postponement as a preventive and exceptional measure rather than a restraint on the press at large. Publicity, in the architecture of these instruments, is the default state of the judicial process, restrictions are exceptions that must justify themselves, and the instruments that impose them are the same ones that guarantee the default.

The most consequential extension of the open court in the system’s history came without legislation. In Swapnil Tripathi v Supreme Court of India (2018) the Court held that live streaming of proceedings in cases of constitutional and national importance belonged to the open court principle itself, flowing from the right of access to justice under Article 21 and from Article 145(4), and it laid down safeguards excluding categories where streaming would harm the participants, matrimonial matters, cases involving juveniles and offences of a sexual nature among them. Streaming of Constitution Bench hearings of the Supreme Court began in 2022, and several High Courts stream the proceedings of designated benches through their own channels, each under rules and administrative decisions of the court concerned rather than under any statute. The episode belongs in this guide beside the appointments story as evidence of its thesis: the working constitution of the courts changes by judgment and by rule as readily as by Act, and a citizen who reads only the statute book would not know that the country’s highest court can be watched from a telephone.

The public record of what the courts decide rests on law reporting, the unglamorous machinery that makes Article 141 usable, since a precedent no one can read binds in theory alone. The Supreme Court Reports is the official report of the Court’s judgments; private law reports publish the same judgments under commercial citations; and for most of the republic’s history, access to the authoritative text ran through subscriptions and libraries. That position changed by administrative action of the Court itself in January 2023, when the electronic Supreme Court Reports project, e-SCR, opened free access to some thirty four thousand judgments of the Court, digitised from the Supreme Court Reports from 1950 onward, searchable through the Court’s website and the judgment portal of the National Judicial Data Grid. The same period saw the spread of the neutral citation, a citation allotted by the court itself in a standard form, of the kind the Delhi and Kerala High Courts had adopted for their judgments, so that a judgment may be cited by a reference that no publisher owns. Copies and inspection of the record in a pending matter are governed by the rules of each court: parties are entitled to copies under the Supreme Court Rules and the High Court rules, and strangers to the litigation take them on application and on showing cause, a rule that mediates between the open court and the privacy of the file. Cause lists, orders of the day and case status pass to the public through the Case Information System and the courts’ websites described in the pendency section. The architectural point is the one this guide has made at every layer: the publicity of Indian justice is guaranteed by a constitutional clause, two lines in the codes, a protective chapter in a 1971 statute and a body of judge made streaming law, and it can be widened by a committee of the Court amending rules, without Parliament voting at all.

The hearing itself acquired a remote form by the same instruments. The evidentiary foundation was laid early: in State of Maharashtra v Praful B. Desai (2003) the Supreme Court held that evidence recorded by video conferencing satisfies the requirement that evidence be recorded in the presence of the accused, presence being read as effective presence where the witness is examined and cross examined through the medium with the safeguards the Court specified. When court buildings closed in 2020, the step from that holding to general practice was taken by the Court in a suo motu proceeding, issuing directions in April 2020 under Article 142 for the adoption of video conferencing hearings across the courts of the country, for the High Courts to frame or adapt rules on the model the e-Committee circulated, and for district courts to work through the facilities the eCourts project had installed. Hearings by video link, and after the buildings reopened, hearings in hybrid form in which some participants appear in the courtroom and others on screen, rest on that combination of a constitutional direction, court framed rules and administrative practice rather than on any amendment to the procedure codes, which continued throughout to speak of evidence and appearance in the older vocabulary and were applied to the new medium by construction. The pattern is by this point in the guide a familiar one. A technology arrived that the codes did not contemplate, and the system absorbed it through the layers it always uses when the legislature has not spoken: a judgment construing the code, a direction issued under a constitutional power, model rules from a committee of judges, and local rules in each High Court, leaving a practice that is uniform in outline and different in its details from one State’s courts to another’s, exactly as the map of the subordinate judiciary would predict.

The High Courts at work: writs, superintendence and the appellate spine

The constitutional layer section above listed what the text grants; this section records what those grants amount to in daily operation, because the High Court is the institution through which most of the system’s constitutional authority is actually exercised. Article 226 empowers a High Court to issue directions, orders and writs, including habeas corpus, mandamus, prohibition, quo warranto and certiorari, to any person or authority within its territorial jurisdiction, for the enforcement of fundamental rights and for any other purpose. The second limb is wider than anything the Supreme Court holds under Article 32, which runs to fundamental rights alone, and it makes the High Court the first constitutional court for the great mass of public law litigation: service matters not captured by the administrative tribunals, land and revenue disputes, municipal action, tax assessments outside the tribunal channels, and the conduct of every subordinate authority in the State. Article 227 adds the power of superintendence over all courts and tribunals within the territory, a power the Supreme Court confirmed in L. Chandra Kumar extends to the tribunals the Constitution itself authorised, and which supports both the High Court’s administrative control under Article 235 and a judicial power to correct jurisdictional error and grave procedural failure in the courts below.

The appellate structure through which error is corrected is statutory in its lower reaches and constitutional only at the summit. A first appeal on facts and law lies under Section 96 of the civil procedure code from every original decree to the court the code and the State civil courts Acts designate, district court or High Court according to valuation. A second appeal lies to the High Court under Section 100 only on a substantial question of law, a narrowing Parliament enacted in 1976 and the courts have applied with varying strictness. Section 115 gives the High Court a revision jurisdiction over cases decided by subordinate courts in which no appeal lies, confined since the 1999 and 2002 amendments to orders that occasion a failure of justice or cause irreparable injury. On the criminal side the codes distribute appeals from the magistracy to the Court of Session and from the sessions court to the High Court, confirm death sentences only on reference to the High Court, and reserve the Supreme Court’s criminal appellate jurisdiction to the categories Article 134 names, supplemented by the special leave jurisdiction under Article 136, which is discretionary, covers any judgment or order of any court or tribunal in the territory of India except the armed forces tribunals, and is exercised on the Court’s own assessment of the case’s importance rather than on any party’s entitlement. The architecture here is a pyramid with discretionary gates at the top: entitlement below, filter above, and the practical administration of the filters, the admission hearings and the defect curing, governed by the court rules of each forum.

One inheritance complicates the picture at its oldest points. The chartered High Courts at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras descend from the Indian High Courts Act, 1861 and their Letters Patent, and they retain an ordinary original civil jurisdiction, trying suits in the first instance within their cities, which the Delhi High Court also holds under the Delhi High Court Act, 1966. The consequence is a two track map within the same State: a commercial suit of value in Mumbai begins on the original side of the Bombay High Court and appeals within it to a division bench, while the same suit in Nagpur begins in the district judiciary. Letters Patent appeals, intra court appeals from a single judge to a division bench, survive in the chartered courts and Delhi as a further statutory chartered layer that the uniform codes never displaced. The guide records the seam because it explains otherwise puzzling forum differences between States, and because it is the oldest surviving proof of the guide’s thesis, that the working system is accumulated instruments, each layer laid down by the authority that held power at the time and none of them since consolidated away.

A further procedural development belongs in this section because it altered who can set the writ jurisdiction in motion. From the late nineteen seventies the Supreme Court, and following it the High Courts, relaxed the standing requirement in public interest litigation, entertaining petitions from persons other than the directly injured party, and in a line of cases treated letters and press reports as writ petitions, the epistolary jurisdiction. The development rests on construction of Articles 32 and 226 rather than on any procedural statute, and it expanded the writ courts’ docket into prison conditions, bonded labour, environment and public administration generally. Its defenders describe it as the only channel through which diffuse and unorganised interests reach a constitutional court; its critics, including at times benches of the courts themselves, describe a standing jurisdiction over administration exercised without a case, on material the adversarial process did not test, and have progressively surrounded it with filters on bona fides and subject matter. The guide adopts neither description; it records the device as judge made procedure of the first importance, created without legislative change, which is exactly the kind of fact about the system that a statute index cannot show.

Transfer and reference: moving a case within the system

A case is born in one court but is not chained to it, and the instruments that move cases between courts are a family of transfer and reference powers distributed across the Constitution and the codes. The civil code states the general power first. Section 24 of the Code of Civil Procedure empowers the High Court and the district court, on the application of a party or of their own motion, to transfer any suit, appeal or other proceeding pending before them to a subordinate court competent to try it, or to withdraw such a proceeding from a subordinate court and try it themselves or transfer it onward. Section 25, recast by the amendment of 1976, gives the Supreme Court the inter-State power: where the Court is satisfied that an order is expedient for the ends of justice, it may direct that any suit, appeal or other proceeding be transferred from a High Court or other civil court in one State to a High Court or other civil court in another State, on an application made by motion and supported by affidavit. Transfer petitions, civil and criminal together, are a visible class of the Supreme Court’s miscellaneous docket, and they test a recurring balance: the defendant’s and the plaintiff’s legitimate convenience, the wife’s circumstances in matrimonial litigation, the apprehension of an unfair trial in the original forum, and the system’s interest in not letting forum choice become forum engineering. The criminal codes carry the parallel ladder, in Section 447 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita for the High Court’s power to transfer cases and appeals within its Sessions divisions and Section 448 for the Sessions Judge’s corresponding power, the counterparts of Sections 407 and 408 of the Code of 1973.

The Constitution adds two transfer devices of its own, aimed at duplication and at constitutional questions. Article 139A, inserted by the Forty-second Amendment, provides that where cases involving the same or substantially the same questions of law are pending before the Supreme Court and one or more High Courts, or before two or more High Courts, and the Supreme Court is satisfied that such questions are substantial questions of general importance, the Court may withdraw the cases pending before the High Courts and dispose of them itself, on the application of the Attorney-General or of a party or of its own motion; its second clause empowers the Supreme Court to transfer any case, appeal or other proceeding pending before any High Court to any other High Court if it is expedient for the ends of justice to do so. Article 228 works in the opposite direction of gravity: if the High Court is satisfied that a case pending in a court subordinate to it involves a substantial question of law as to the interpretation of the Constitution, the determination of which is necessary for the disposal of the case, it shall withdraw the case and may either dispose of it itself or determine the constitutional question and return the case to the court from which it was withdrawn, with a copy of its judgment on that question, for disposal in conformity with it. The reference proper, distinct from withdrawal, is the device of Section 113 and Order XLVI of the civil code: a subordinate court which entertains a reasonable doubt on a question of law in a pending case, including a doubt about the validity of an Act, Ordinance or Regulation whose determination is necessary to the disposal of the case and which has not been declared invalid by the High Court or the Supreme Court, may state a case and refer it for the opinion of the High Court, proceeding to judgment after that opinion is received. Read together, the transfer and reference provisions are the plumbing of a single judicial system: they exist because twenty five High Courts and thousands of subordinate courts apply one body of central law, and without machinery to gather duplicated questions into one forum and to lift constitutional questions to the forum equipped to answer them, the uniformity that Article 141 promises at the end of an appeal would arrive too late to guide the cases that produce it.

The subordinate courts: grades, dockets and the separated magistracy

Below the High Courts the map becomes State law, since the constitution and organisation of the subordinate courts is administered by each State under its own civil courts Act and criminal court structure. The civil side of a district typically runs in grades: the district judge at its head exercising original and appellate jurisdiction, additional district judges of the same rank, senior civil judges and civil judges in descending grades, with pecuniary limits for each grade prescribed by the State Act and raised from time to time by notification or amendment. Small causes courts, constituted under the Provincial Small Cause Courts Act, 1887 (Act 9 of 1887), try suits of a civil nature below prescribed values by a summary procedure, with no appeal from their decrees and only a revision to the High Court or the district court, which makes them the system’s designed instrument for high volume small claims and the model the Gram Nyayalayas later borrowed. Rent controllers, motor accident claims tribunals and other designated authorities attach to this skeleton at points the special statutes choose, sometimes as courts, sometimes as tribunals staffed by serving judicial officers, so that the district complex a citizen visits houses half a dozen distinct legal capacities in adjacent rooms.

The criminal side carries the imprint of Article 50’s separation directive, executed by the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 and carried forward by the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. Judicial magistrates, in first and second class grades under the chief judicial magistrate of each district, try the bulk of criminal cases and are under the control of the High Court as members of the judicial service. Executive magistrates, the district magistrate and sub divisional magistrates drawn from the State’s executive service, retain the preventive and regulatory functions the codes assign them, security proceedings, unlawful assembly dispersal, and the power the Sanhita’s Section 163 carries forward from Section 144 of the 1973 Code to issue urgent orders in cases of apprehended danger. The Court of Session, presided over by the district judge in the sessions capacity with additional and assistant sessions judges, tries the grave offences and hears the appeals and revisions the codes route to it, and sentences of death it passes take effect only on the High Court’s confirmation. Prosecution before these courts is conducted by public prosecutors appointed under the codes by the State government from panels prepared in consultation with the district judiciary, with a directorate of prosecution above them in States that have constituted one, a post separation institution that formalised the prosecutor’s independence from the investigating police.

Recruitment and career within this structure are where the State rules mentioned in the constitutional section do their work. The civil judge grade is filled by competitive examination conducted by the State Public Service Commission or, in a growing number of States, by the High Court itself, with a syllabus of local Acts, the codes and the State language; the higher judicial service is filled by promotion from that grade and by direct recruitment from the bar with the seven year practice qualification Article 233 prescribes, in proportions the service rules fix. Training runs through the State judicial academies, an institution built from the nineteen nineties onward with a National Judicial Academy at Bhopal at its apex for serving officers of all States. The district judiciary’s conditions, housing, court staff, stenographers and process servers, are supplied by the State government through the district administration, and the running complaint of the institution, recorded in successive reports of the Law Commission and the committee reports the Supreme Court has commissioned, is that the subordinate courts’ physical and staffing establishment has never been funded to the establishment strength the sanctions themselves declare necessary. That complaint is a budgetary fact rather than a legal one, and it forms the bridge to the two sections that follow, which deal with the administration and the finance of the system as instruments in their own right.

Training and advice: the academy and the Law Commission

Two institutions serve the system without adjudicating anything, and neither of them is a statutory creation, which is itself a fact about how the system’s soft layer is built. The National Judicial Academy at Bhopal is registered as a society, registered in 1993 under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, fully funded by the Government of India and governed by a governing council chaired by the Chief Justice of India. Its mandate is judicial education, research and policy development for the administration of justice: training programmes for judges and judicial officers in their adjudicative and court administration work, studies of court management, and the exchange of practice across the States. Below it, the State judicial academies, maintained under the authority of the High Courts, run the induction training of newly recruited civil judges and the in-service training of the State cadres, the stage of a judicial officer’s formation that the recruitment sections of this guide presuppose. No Act of Parliament creates the Academy or prescribes a syllabus; the institution rests on registration, funding and the judiciary’s own governance, and proposals to give judicial training a statutory frame have remained proposals. The training of the Indian judiciary is thus supplied by bodies the legislature never enacted, inside a system whose other layers are fixed by texts of the highest formality.

The Law Commission of India is the older and the wider of the two, and it is likewise an executive rather than a statutory body. Commissions of law reform sat in India from the first Law Commission of 1834, constituted under the Charter Act of 1833 and chaired by Lord Macaulay, whose work fed the codification of the penal and procedure codes; the first Law Commission of independent India was constituted in 1955 under the chairmanship of M. C. Setalvad, the first Attorney General of India, and commissions have since been constituted by executive order at intervals, conventionally for terms of three years, as advisory bodies to the Ministry of Law and Justice whose recommendations bind no one. The Commission’s reports are the seedbed of much of the law this guide maps: its Fourteenth Report of 1958 on the reform of judicial administration, its 116th Report of 1986 on the All India Judicial Service, its 120th Report of 1987 on manpower planning in the judiciary, which produced the figure of fifty judges per million against which the pendency section measures the system, its 114th Report of 1986 behind the Gram Nyayalayas Act and its 229th Report of 2009 behind the seat debate all began as advice that governments were free to take or leave. Some reports became Acts, many became parts of Acts, and many were never acted on, and the Commission has no instrument except the quality of its reasoning with which to alter the law it studies. Placed beside the academy, the Commission completes this guide’s final layer: beneath the Constitution, the statutes, the court rules and the case law sits a penumbra of non-statutory institutions, academies, commissions and committees, which train the people the system appoints and draft the reforms the system debates, exercising influence that the map records without being able to assign them a row of their own in the table that follows.

Which instrument governs: the map in one place

Every section above assigned one part of the system to one instrument. The table compresses those assignments into the form a reader can test: take a question a citizen or a student actually asks, and the governing authority sits in one of four columns, constitutional provision, statute, rules, or the authority that operates the decision. Read down any row and the section that owns the subject is recoverable; read across the columns and the design of the whole system is visible, a constitutional frame of great generality, a dense statutory middle, and a working surface of rules that the courts and the profession make for themselves.

Question	Constitutional provision	Statute	Rules	Who decides
How many judges may the Supreme Court have	Article 124(1) sets the starting number and delegates the rest	Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Act, 1956	None	Parliament, by ordinary amendment
How many judges does a High Court have	Article 216	None	None	The President, revising sanctioned strength
Who appoints a Supreme Court judge	Article 124(2), as construed in the Second and Third Judges cases	None; the NJAC Act, 2014 was struck down in 2015	Memorandum of Procedure	The collegium recommends; the President appoints
Who appoints a district judge	Article 233	State service rules under Articles 233 to 235	High Court regulations	The Governor, in consultation with the High Court
What are a judge’s salary and pension	Articles 125 and 221 protect against disadvantageous variation	The Judges (Salaries and Conditions of Service) Acts, 1954 and 1958	Service rules under the Acts	Parliament, by amendment
How may a judge be removed	Article 124(4) and (5)	Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968	Committee procedure under the Act	Parliament, by address of both Houses
What procedure does a civil court follow	None, beyond fragments	Code of Civil Procedure, 1908	First Schedule rules as altered by each High Court; Article 225 rules	Parliament and the High Court jointly
What procedure does a criminal court follow	Article 50 directed separation of the magistracy	Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023	High Court criminal rules of practice	Parliament and the State legislatures
How long may a claimant wait	None	Limitation Act, 1963	None	Parliament; the court applies Section 3
What fee does a suit carry	None; fees except in the Supreme Court fall in Entry 3 of the State List	State court fees and suits valuation Acts, or the Court Fees Act, 1870 as locally amended	Supreme Court Rules for the Supreme Court	The State legislature
Who may argue a case	None	Advocates Act, 1961	Bar Council of India Rules	The State Bar Council enrols; the councils discipline
Where does a party without means get a lawyer	Article 39A	Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987	NALSA schemes and State regulations	The district legal services authority
Where does a commercial dispute of the specified value go	None	Commercial Courts Act, 2015	Case management under the amended Code	The Commercial Division or Commercial Court
What happens when an order is disobeyed	Articles 129 and 215 make the higher courts courts of record	Contempt of Courts Act, 1971 defines and limits	Contempt rules of each court	The Supreme Court or the High Court
Where does a service dispute of a government servant go	Article 323A	Administrative Tribunals Act, 1985	Tribunal procedure rules	The administrative tribunal, subject to the High Court

The table’s empty cells are its argument. Two of the fifteen questions are governed by no statute at all: the size of a High Court, because the Constitution handed it to the President, and the appointment of the higher judiciary, because the governing instrument is a construction of the constitutional text embodied in judgments and a negotiated memorandum. Two more are governed by State law and therefore have no single Indian answer. A reader who has absorbed the table owns the guide’s claim in usable form: find the row, and the forum for changing the answer, court, Parliament, State legislature, President or council, follows from the columns.

Reading the map: how a citizen’s matter travels

A single tenancy dispute in a district town tests the whole construction, and tracing it end to end shows how the layers interlock in one ordinary life. The dispute begins as a claim for arrears and possession. Its forum is fixed by the State court fees and suits valuation Act’s valuation and by the civil procedure code’s rules of pecuniary jurisdiction, which between them place the plaint in the court of a civil judge of the appropriate grade. Its fee is the State Act’s ad valorem charge on the valuation, not any fee the Constitution knows. Its life is rationed by the Limitation Act: the arrears claim carries its three year period, the possession claim its twelve, and Section 3 stands behind the defendant’s pleadings whether raised or not. Its conduct is governed by the Code of 1908 as the High Court’s Section 122 amendments have locally reshaped it, including the High Court’s rules on pleading and service. The judge who tries it entered service through a State examination under rules framed on Articles 234 and 235, is controlled in posting and promotion by the High Court under Article 235, and was appointed in form by the Governor. Either party may at the hearing stage be referred by the court itself, under Section 89 of the Code, to mediation, where the Mediation Act, 2023 supplies the framework and a settlement returns as a decree. Judgment is followed, if the loser disobeys the decree, by execution under the Code and, if the conduct crosses into wilful disobedience of the court’s order, by the High Court’s contempt jurisdiction on reference or appeal. An appeal runs to the District Court and then, on a substantial question of law, to the High Court under Section 100 of the Code, where the bench that hears it was appointed through the collegium process and holds a sanctioned strength the President revised. Not one step of that journey was designed in one place.

Gathering the texts for a journey of that kind is a practical problem of its own for the student or the litigant in person, since codes, State fee schedules and court rules arrive as documents in mixed formats, and readers who keep the set together for study may open and read them side by side in an office file viewer for the documents a court file generates, which is a convenience for reading the instruments and nothing more. This guide is legal information, not legal advice, and no part of it substitutes for counsel on a live matter; the map tells a reader where authority sits, and a live dispute still belongs with the advocate the Advocates Act enrols for the purpose. The State dimension deserves the final emphasis in this section, because it is the layer national commentary most often omits: the subordinate judiciary is a State subject in its daily governance, the fee that prices the claim is State law, the rules that shape the pleading are the High Court’s, and two identical disputes in two States are litigated under materially different local law from the first filing. The unity of the Indian judicial system is a unity of hierarchy and of appellate doctrine under Article 141, laid over twenty five High Courts and fifty different settlements of the working detail, and both halves of that sentence are true at once.

Verdict

The guide’s scattered attributions reduce to a single architectural judgment, and the analysis earns the right to state it plainly. India’s courts are not governed by a judicial code, a courts Act, or any one instrument; they are governed by a distribution, and the distribution is the finding. The Constitution entrenches the courts’ existence, their judges’ tenure and independence, the binding force of the Supreme Court’s word and its own contempt power, and then falls silent on almost everything that decides how the system feels to the people inside it. Statutes fix the size of the apex court, the pay of every judge, the removal process that has never removed anyone, the procedure of every trial, the deadlines that kill claims, the monopoly of the bar, the entitlement to a free lawyer and the settlement machinery that resolves much of the docket without a judge. State law prices the forum. Court rules govern the working day. Case law, not legislation, governs who becomes a judge. And the one reform the Constitution expressly pre-built, the All India Judicial Service, waits unused behind a resolution that has never been moved, while the one reform enacted at the constitutional level, the appointments commission, was struck down for damaging the independence it sought to rebalance. A reader who wants to change any part of this system must first find its row in the map, because the map is the system, and every failed reform in the field began by addressing the wrong layer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Which laws govern India’s courts?

No single statute governs them. The Constitution establishes the Supreme Court and the High Courts, fixes tenure and the removal threshold, and declares their precedents binding, but leaves the working detail elsewhere: the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Act, 1956 fixes the apex court’s size, the Judges (Salaries and Conditions of Service) Acts of 1954 and 1958 fix pay, the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968 operates removal, the procedure codes govern trials, State court fees Acts price the forum, the Advocates Act, 1961 governs the profession, and the courts’ own rules regulate daily practice. Authority is distributed by subject, not gathered in one courts Act.

Q: How is the Supreme Court’s strength fixed?

By ordinary statute. Article 124(1) established the Court with a Chief Justice and not more than seven other judges until Parliament prescribed a larger number by law. Parliament used the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Act, 1956, which as enacted prescribed ten judges besides the Chief Justice, and amended it in 1960, 1977, 1986, the amendment effective in 2009, and 2019, raising the number besides the Chief Justice to thirteen, seventeen, twenty five, thirty and thirty three in turn. The sanctioned strength stands at thirty four including the Chief Justice, and Parliament may change it by simple majority without amending the Constitution.

Q: Who appoints judges of the higher judiciary?

Formally the President appoints them under Articles 124(2) and 217(1), after consultation. The operative content of consultation was settled by judgment: the Second Judges case of 1993 gave primacy to the opinion of the Chief Justice of India formed collectively, and the Third Judges case of 1998 fixed the collegium at the Chief Justice and the four senior most judges for Supreme Court appointments. The National Judicial Appointments Commission created by the Ninety-ninth Amendment and the Act of 2014 was struck down in 2015, so appointments run through the collegium and a Memorandum of Procedure negotiated with the government.

Q: How are district judges appointed?

By the Governor of the State in consultation with the High Court, under Article 233. A person not already in the service of the Union or a State is eligible only after not less than seven years as an advocate or pleader and on the High Court’s recommendation. In practice the district judiciary is filled through the State higher judicial service examinations conducted under State rules and by promotion from the subordinate judicial service. The rest of the judicial service is appointed under Article 234 by the Governor under rules framed after consulting the State Public Service Commission and the High Court, and control over postings, promotion and discipline rests with the High Court under Article 235.

Q: What is the All India Judicial Service and why does it not exist?

It is a proposed all India service for the district judiciary, on the pattern of the other all India services, which Article 312 has permitted since the Forty-second Amendment of 1976 added the words including an all-India judicial service and barred the service from covering any post inferior to that of a district judge. It does not exist because creating it requires a Rajya Sabha resolution passed by two thirds of members present and voting, followed by an Act of Parliament, and the consultations between the Union, the State governments and the High Courts have never produced agreement; no Bill has been introduced. Proponents seek national standards and mobility; opponents defend State recruitment, High Court control and local language and law.

Q: Which laws govern court procedure?

The procedural codes are ordinary statutes. Civil procedure runs on the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, whose body Parliament wrote and whose First Schedule rules each High Court may alter for its courts under Section 122. Criminal procedure and evidence ran on the codes of 1973 and 1872 until 1 July 2024, when the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 took over, alongside the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita for substantive penal law. Over the codes sit the Supreme Court Rules made under Article 145 and each High Court’s rules of practice under Article 225, so a case is governed by statute, code and court rule in layers.

Q: What special courts exist alongside the regular courts?

Several standing designs. Family courts under the Family Courts Act, 1984 take matrimonial and family matters with a settlement first approach. Commercial Divisions and Commercial Courts under the Commercial Courts Act, 2015 take commercial disputes above a specified value, set at three lakh rupees since 2018. Gram Nyayalayas under the Gram Nyayalayas Act, 2008 take scheduled criminal offences and small civil claims at the panchayat level with simplified procedure. Around these sit special courts under sectoral statutes for corruption, narcotics, child protection and atrocities cases, fast track courts for sessions backlogs, and tribunals, which adjudicate outside the court hierarchy but under the High Courts’ writ jurisdiction.

Q: What is being done about pendency?

The responses follow the layers of the system. Sanctioned strengths have been raised, including the Supreme Court’s enlargement in 2019 and periodic increases for the High Courts. Fast track and fast track special courts were funded to clear sessions backlogs, and Lok Adalats under the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987 settle cases in large numbers on the authorities’ published returns. The eCourts project computerised the district courts, produced the National Judicial Data Grid as the public count, and supports e filing and virtual courts for petty matters. Procedure reforms in the codes and the commercial courts regime compress timelines. The vacancy gap between sanctioned and working strength remains the standing qualification.

Q: Which article of the Constitution establishes the Supreme Court of India?

Article 124. It provides that there shall be a Supreme Court of India consisting of a Chief Justice of India and, until Parliament by law prescribes a larger number, not more than seven other judges. The article and its neighbours in Part V also carry the appointment mechanism, the qualifications in clause (3), the removal procedure in clause (4), the oath, and the bar on a retired judge practising before any court in India. Article 124 is therefore both the Court’s charter and the starting point of the argument this guide traces, since its own words delegate the Court’s eventual size to an ordinary Act which Parliament has amended six times.

Q: Who makes the rules that govern practice and procedure in the Supreme Court and the High Courts?

The courts themselves, in the main. The Supreme Court frames its rules under Article 145, with the approval of the President, and the Supreme Court Rules regulate filing, listing, review and costs. Article 225 preserves and empowers each High Court’s rule making over practice and procedure, subject to law made by the appropriate legislature, and Section 122 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 authorises High Courts to alter the First Schedule’s rules for the courts subordinate to them through rule committees. Parliament retains the superior power: it enacted the codes and can amend any rule’s substance by statute, so judicial rule making operates inside a statutory frame rather than above it.

Q: What does the Judges (Inquiry) Act 1968 actually do?

It supplies the procedure Article 124(5) authorises for proving the misbehaviour or incapacity on which alone a judge of the Supreme Court or a High Court may be removed. The Act, numbered 51 of 1968 and in force from 1 January 1969, requires a motion signed by one hundred members of the Lok Sabha or fifty of the Rajya Sabha, and on its admission a three member committee, a Supreme Court judge or Chief Justice, a High Court Chief Justice and a distinguished jurist, investigates and reports. Only a report of guilt takes the motion to the double majority vote Article 124(4) prescribes. No proceeding under the Act has ended in a removal.

Q: Which laws fix the salaries and service conditions of judges?

Two statutes operating on two constitutional articles. Article 125 governs the Supreme Court and Article 221 the High Courts: salaries are as Parliament determines by law, charged on the Consolidated Fund, and no privilege or allowance may be varied to a judge’s disadvantage after appointment. The statutes are the Supreme Court Judges (Salaries and Conditions of Service) Act, 1958 (Act 41 of 1958) and the High Court Judges (Salaries and Conditions of Service) Act, 1954 (Act 28 of 1954), which carry pay, leave, pension and allowances. A joint amendment of 2018 revised the figures with effect from 1 January 2016.

Q: What does the Contempt of Courts Act 1971 define and limit?

The Act, numbered 70 of 1971, defines contempt and confines the punishment of it. Its long title states the purpose: to define and limit the powers of certain courts in punishing contempts and to regulate their procedure. Section 2 divides contempt into civil contempt, wilful disobedience of an order or breach of an undertaking, and criminal contempt, publication or acts that scandalise a court, prejudice proceedings or interfere with the administration of justice. Later sections protect fair reporting and fair comment, cap punishment under Section 12 at six months’ simple imprisonment or a fine of two thousand rupees, and set a one year limitation in Section 20. The power itself comes from Articles 129 and 215.

Q: Which law decides the court fee payable on a suit in India?

Usually a State law, not a central one. Fees taken in all courts except the Supreme Court fall within Entry 3 of the State List, and most large States have their own court fees and suits valuation Acts, Tamil Nadu’s of 1955, Kerala’s of 1959 and Karnataka’s of 1958 among them, which set ad valorem fees on the value of the claim and also govern the valuation that fixes pecuniary jurisdiction. Some States continue with the Court Fees Act, 1870 (Act 7 of 1870) as locally amended. Fees in the Supreme Court are prescribed under the Supreme Court Rules. The same claim can therefore carry materially different fees in different States.

Q: Which articles of the Constitution authorise the creation of tribunals?

Article 323A and Article 323B, inserted together as Part XIV-A by the Forty-second Amendment of 1976. Article 323A empowers Parliament alone to create administrative tribunals for service disputes of Union and State employees, the footing of the Administrative Tribunals Act, 1985. Article 323B empowers Parliament and the State legislatures to create tribunals for listed fields including taxation, industrial and labour disputes, land reforms, ceiling on urban property and elections. Legislatures also create tribunals under their ordinary subject entries, which is how the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal predates Part XIV-A. Later judgments, beginning with L. Chandra Kumar in 1997, kept every tribunal under the High Courts’ writ jurisdiction.

Q: Where does a commercial dispute of the specified value go in India?

To a Commercial Court or a Commercial Division created by the Commercial Courts Act, 2015 (Act 4 of 2016). High Courts exercising ordinary original civil jurisdiction sit as Commercial Divisions, and Commercial Courts function at district level elsewhere. The specified value, one crore rupees at enactment, was reduced to three lakh rupees by the Amendment Act of 2018, which also inserted Section 12A requiring pre-institution mediation where no urgent interim relief is sought. The forum applies the civil procedure code as the 2015 Act modifies it, with case management hearings, strict written statement timelines and costs designed to discourage adjournments. Appeals run to the Commercial Appellate Division or the High Court.

Q: Which statutes replaced the Code of Criminal Procedure 1973 and the Indian Evidence Act 1872, and from when?

The Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (Act 46 of 2023) replaced the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (Act 47 of 2023) replaced the Indian Evidence Act, 1872. Both took effect on 1 July 2024, together with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (Act 45 of 2023) in place of the Indian Penal Code, 1860. The new codes largely carry forward the older law with renumbering and selected changes, and savings provisions keep pending proceedings under the repealed codes for the matters they cover. Parliament made the exchange in the exercise of its concurrent power over criminal procedure and evidence, without any constitutional amendment.

Q: What is a Gram Nyayalaya and which Act creates it?

A Gram Nyayalaya is a court at the intermediate panchayat level for a group of panchayats, created by the Gram Nyayalayas Act, 2008 (Act 4 of 2009), brought into force on 2 October 2009. A State government establishes it in consultation with the High Court, and it is presided over by a Nyayadhikari of the grade of a Judicial Magistrate of the first class. It tries the offences in the Act’s First Schedule and the civil claims in the Second, attempts conciliation first, follows a summary procedure guided by natural justice rather than the strict evidence code, and its decisions are appealable to the Court of Session and the District Court. Functioning courts remain in the low hundreds against plans counted in thousands.

Q: How is the strength of a High Court decided, and who decides it?

The President decides it, from time to time, under Article 216, which provides for a Chief Justice and such other judges as the President may deem necessary to appoint. There is no number of judges statute for the High Courts, unlike the Supreme Court. Sanctioned strengths are maintained by the Department of Justice and revised periodically through proposals involving the High Court, the State government and the Union government, weighed against institution and disposal figures. The distinction matters for reform: enlarging a High Court is an executive determination made in consultation with the judiciary, while enlarging the Supreme Court requires Parliament to amend the Act of 1956.

Q: What is the National Judicial Data Grid and what does it record?

It is the public statistics platform of the Indian judiciary, maintained under the eCourts project and fed by the Case Information System used in the district and taluka courts, with High Court data on connected portals. The Grid records cases instituted, disposed of and pending, broken down by court, case type, stage and age, for the subordinate courts that form the bulk of the system, and publishes the figures that official statements on pendency rely on. Its value for the reader is the breakdown: it separates criminal from civil, fresh institution from old stock, and one State’s courts from another’s, which is the minimum discipline any figure on the backlog requires.