ThePrintAM: What does research institute DAKSH's report say about the state of India's commercial tribunal system?

India’s economic reform journey is a patchwork of contradictions. Highs such as GST 2.0, which promises to simplify compliance, widen the tax base, and smooth the arteries of commerce, are celebrated. Yet hidden lows continue to act as speedbreakers on India’s path to becoming a global ease-of-doing-business powerhouse.

New Delhi: Ideated as special adjudicatory bodies to review administrative decisions, tribunals across sectors have expanded their powers beyond the ambit of administrative laws. The expectation was that the commercial tribunals would deliver better outcomes than traditional courts. However, in practice, they struggle with the same problems.

Tribunals have distinct problems compared to courts, such as the need for more judges with specialised or technical knowledge of the law, the necessity for faster and more economical methods of adjudication, and the lack of finality when it comes to their decisions, former Supreme Court judge Justice Shiva Kirti Singh said Thursday.

Tribunals were set up to offer swift, cost-effective, and decentralised resolution to legal disputes. The principal idea was that these quasi-judicial bodies would comprise members with specific sector expertise to deliver better-informed judgments relatively swiftly, reducing the caseload on regular courts. It is deeply concerning, therefore, to discover that India’s commercial tribunals in particular suffer from the same infirmities as the regular judicial system.

India’s commercial tribunals are grappling with a mounting backlog of 356,000 cases, worth ₹24.72 trillion, as of September, according to a study by legal think-tank DAKSH. The value of these pending cases amounts to about 7.48 per cent of India’s gross domestic product (GDP) for 2024-25, the think-tank estimates in its State of Tribunals 2025 report.

The Odisha government has released a tender to develop, maintain, and operate an AI-based Judicial Petition Response Drafting System, as it plans to automate the judicial petition response generation process.

Last month, the President of India, Droupadi Murmu, highlighted the issue of court delays. In her speech at the National Conference of the District Judiciary, she noted that these delays are what are making people hesitate approaching courts, as they fear that the pursuit of justice will complicate their lives further.

A few weeks ago, the case of a woman who had filed a rape case, was sentenced to imprisonment, and fined by a court in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, dominated the headlines. The narrative, echoed by select media users, painted a picture of a woman who had brazenly fabricated rape accusations.

The number of bail applications filed in the country's high courts has increased by 35 percent in the past eight years.

Over the past eight years, bail cases filed across high courts in India have increased by about 35 per cent. Amid innumerable Supreme Court declarations emphasising bail as a ‘default’ practice, district courts routinely deny it.

Karnataka fell to 14th rank in 2020 from 6th rank in 2019 in terms of the overall justice delivery system, as per the India Justice Report released in Bengaluru on Saturday. While Karnataka topped the list in policing,