AS the Goods and Services Tax Appellate Tribunal (GSTAT) begins operations across India, it arrives at a time when concerns about global funds flow, working capital crunch, tax uncertainty, and judicial efficiency are increasingly shaping economic policy discussions.

The fundamental flaw is the absence of an institutional home for reform: a body empowered to take a comprehensive, long-term view of judicial transformation.

For core and essential functioning, the judiciary must be treated as one unified system, not a federated coalition of wildly individualistic sub-systems.

No AI tool can reliably extract or interpret intelligible court documents without the contextualised human intelligence that created them. As a system, OCOD will be ripe with such files.

When it comes to AI, courts must be better prepared to manage risks posed by a technology that is in a perpetual state of improvement.

Technology is adopted in a way that has contributed to the problems of litigation processes at High Courts, instead of simplifying them.

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.