MCA annual reports offer only a high-level snapshot of cases received and disposed at the national level and no bench-level disaggregation, no sectoral breakdown, no information on the nature of disposal. IBBI’s quarterly newsletters are richer, but their categories have changed over time, making year-on-year comparison unreliable. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance noted the need for “greater clarity in purpose” across the regulatory reporting ecosystem.7 IBBI’s own order repository carries an explicit disclaimer that it “does not authenticate the contents” of the orders it publishes, a remarkable admission from the regulator overseeing the process.
These data problems do not arise in a vacuum. The NCLT’s sanctioned strength is 62 members; in September 2021, actual strength had fallen to 28. DAKSH’s Time and Motion Study found that only 64
per cent of sanctioned members were actively presiding during the observation period, and that members frequently failed to sit for the required number of hours.8 Vacancy rates are not evenly distributed across benches or time periods, but this information does not appear in published data. This means that any regression model treating NCLT bench as a fixed effect without controlling for contemporaneous vacancy levels is misspecified.
A further complication is that NCLT benches do not apply the IBC uniformly. Divergences in approach on contested issues, the treatment of related-party creditors, and the interpretation of timelines have been flagged repeatedly. As the IBC Brief published by IICA observed, “the divergences in approach among NCLT benches erode the integrity of the insolvency process.”9 For econometric research, this means that a resolution outcome at the Mumbai bench and one at the Hyderabad bench may not be comparable observations drawn from the same institutional process.
It is tempting to treat data scarcity as a merely academic inconvenience. That framing is wrong. The same opacity that frustrates researchers frustrates the commercial actors whose confidence the IBC depends upon. DAKSH documented this directly: uncertainty about NCLT approval timelines has led successful resolution applicants to withdraw from plans that had lost value while awaiting tribunal approval, reducing the pool of investors willing to engage with IBC assets.10
India’s gross NPA ratio has fallen from 11.2 per cent in 2018 to a twelve-year low of 2.6 per cent by September 2024, partly on the strength of the IBC’s creditor discipline.11 But that improvement cannot fully translate into investment confidence so long as the adjudicating authority at the centre of the process remains empirically unaccountable. A tribunal that does not publish machine-readable orders, does not maintain stable URLs, and does not consistently define the metrics by which its own performance is measured is, in practical terms, a black box. Black boxes do not attract institutional capital. They repel it.
The remedies are knowable. Based on what researchers who have worked with NCLT data have learned, the following interventions would materially reduce the barriers described above.
First, all NCLT orders should be published in machine-readable, text-searchable PDF format with structured metadata: case number, bench, date of admission, nature of order, and CIRP stage. This is a technical standard, not a governance reform, and is implementable within existing systems.
Second, each NCLT case should have a persistent, stable digital identifier. URLs should not change when portal systems are upgraded; historical orders should remain accessible at their original locations through permanent redirects.
Third, IBBI and the NCLT should jointly maintain a unified, openly accessible database of all CIRP proceedings across all benches. IBBI’s quarterly newsletters represent a partial step; they need to be converted into a structured, queryable data infrastructure.
Fourth, MCA, IBBI, and the NCLT should agree on common definitions for “recovery rate,” “resolution timeline,” and “case disposal,” with explicit and consistent treatment of excluded periods and interlocutory applications.
Fifth, the NCLT should publish monthly data on actual versus sanctioned member strength by bench, along with sitting hours derived from cause lists. This would allow researchers and policymakers to isolate capacity constraints from other determinants of delay.
