In a new opinion piece for Fortune India, DAKSH’s Surya Prakash B S, Anuja Maniar Shah and Almitra Rego examine India’s advance ruling mechanism and ask whether India can provide businesses, particularly non-resident investors, with tax certainty before commercial decisions become irreversible.

Best judgment assessments under Section 144 of the Income-tax Act, 1961 (and Section 271 of the new 2025 Act) are an important part of tax administration, allowing authorities to complete an assessment when a taxpayer does not participate.

Surya Prakash B S of DAKSH, Angela Lusigi of UNDP India and Urvashi Aneja of Digital Futures Lab, write about the use of AI in Indian courts for ThePrint.

India’s eCourts Phase 3 is bringing more judicial processes online, with digital filing, virtual hearings, connected databases, AI-enabled tools, transcription, and many more.

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.

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.