Justice on Time

The plan

1. AI triage of every pending case in 30 days. The Supreme Court e-Committee runs an AI system over the digitised records (over 660 crore pages are already scanned under e-Courts). Cases whose files are not yet scanned are triaged as they are digitised, all by month 6 (Chapter 5). Each case gets a summary of facts, evidence and law, with every point linked to a page of the record. Each case goes into one of three buckets:

   • A, ready to decide: evidence and arguments are complete, or the case is a simple type such as a cheque bounce, a traffic challan or a petty offence.
   • B, one hearing needed.
   • C, full trial needed. The judge in charge can move any case to another bucket with a one-line reason.

2. Bucket A is decided within 60 days.

   • A1, petty compoundable cases (traffic challans, minor offences): the accused is offered online payment of the fixed fine through the virtual courts already running. The case closes on payment within 30 days, signed by a judicial officer in batches. Paying is optional: anyone who asks for a hearing moves to Bucket B, with the same 60-day limit.
   • A2, all other Bucket A cases: the AI writes a draft judgment. Each judge receives at most 8 drafts a working day, and each draft's 60-day clock starts on release. The judge adopts it, changes it and signs, or records written reasons for a different route. Capacity: 8 drafts × 23,558 judges × 250 working days ≈ 4.7 crore a year (estimate), so A2 clears within the year.

3. Bucket C goes to extra benches. About 2,500 additional judges, drawn from retired High Court judges (Article 224A) and re-employed retired district judges, plus evening shifts in existing courts, hear Bucket C. Judges carrying A2 drafts are not given Bucket C trials. Plea bargaining is offered for offences carrying under 7 years.

4. Hard timelines in a Fast Justice Act. Parliament passes it under Entry 11A of the Concurrent List (administration of justice), and High Courts issue matching rules.

   • Serious crimes (murder and rape): trial within 60 days of the chargesheet, heard day to day. Forensic reports are due within 30 days. Free legal aid starts on day 1. One extension of up to 30 days is allowed only by written order of the Sessions Judge, reported to the High Court. If the trial still overruns, the accused may seek bail. Terror, sabotage and riot cases go to the Chapter 26 special courts, which run a 90-day clock because their evidence is larger.
   • Commercial disputes: 90 days.
   • Insolvency: 180 days. With no approved plan at day 180, the business is first sold as a going concern in a 30-day open auction with a reserve price equal to its liquidation value; liquidation follows only if no bid meets the reserve.
   • Adjournments: at most 3 per case, with ₹25,000 costs on the party for each extra request.

5. Undertrials released where the law already allows. Every district's undertrial review committee applies Section 479 of the BNSS (release of first-time undertrials who have served one-third of the maximum sentence) to every eligible prisoner within 30 days, and repeats the review every month.

6. The maximum lawful punishment for the gravest crimes.

   • Death penalty: available, never mandatory, for the gravest murders, terror killings and rape, and where existing law already allows it (knowingly lethal adulteration in Chapter 24, repeat drug trafficking in Chapter 27, group murder in a riot in Chapter 27). A mitigation report on the convict's background, mental health and chance of reform is required in every case. It is carried out only after High Court confirmation and a Supreme Court appeal.
   • Life without remission: a whole natural life in prison for murder and heinous crimes. The trial court recommends it, and the High Court confirms it within 90 days in the same hearing it already holds for death sentences.
   • Lifetime loss of civic rights: no voting, contesting elections or holding public office. Food, medical care, safety and legal access remain, as Article 21 requires.
   • Mercy petitions are decided within 90 days, with published reasons. For whole-life sentences, the constitutional amendment in Chapter 28 (Bill A) narrows the pardon to one ground: fresh evidence of innocence, examined by a High Court bench within 90 days.

7. Loser pays, by default. The Fast Justice Act amends Sections 35 and 35A of the Code of Civil Procedure and Section 273 of the BNSS.

   • Costs follow the event: every civil and commercial judgment ends with a costs order. The losing side pays the winner's legal fees and court fees on a national scale published by the Supreme Court, tied to the value of the claim and revised every year. No separate application is needed.
   • False, malicious or harassing cases: when the court finds a claim, defence, complaint or appeal false, malicious or filed to delay or harass, the loser pays the winner's full actual costs, proven losses (for example a stalled project, lost wages or lost business) and a fixed charge for the court's time, with no upper cap. The ₹3,000 cap in Section 35A ends. Perjury and false-evidence findings are referred for prosecution in the same order.
   • Malicious prosecution: when an accused is acquitted and the court finds the complaint false or malicious, the complainant pays the accused's legal costs plus compensation, for example ₹5,000 for each day in custody. An officer who knowingly registers or pursues a false case pays a share personally and faces dismissal (Chapter 26).
   • The state pays too: the government, the largest litigant, follows the same rule. Costs ordered against a department come from that department's budget, and repeat losing appeals are published.
   • Honest losers on legal aid: a party eligible for free legal aid (the Chapter 23 income rule) who loses a case brought or defended in good faith has the costs order paid by the Legal Aid Fund. The winner is paid in full either way. A finding of malice removes this cover.
   • Payment: awards are due within 30 days and are recovered automatically from the loser's bank account if unpaid, with interest at the Chapter 1 rate.

8. The judge decides, always. AI drafts are marked "assistive". The signed judgment is the judge's own. Death, life and terror cases get an AI summary only, never a draft.

Cost and return

• Loser pays (estimate): the rule is self-funding, since losers pay winners directly. Legal aid cover for honest losers is budgeted at about ₹500 crore a year (estimate), paid from the existing legal services budget and the court-time charges collected from malicious litigants.

• Return (estimate): court delay is estimated to cost India about $70 billion a year (eCourtsIndia). Cutting that by just 10% is worth 10% × $70 billion × ₹94.5 ≈ ₹66,000 crore a year, about 26 times the cost.

• Who builds: the e-Committee publishes open specifications and a certification test (accuracy, citation lock, security). Any Indian AI firm, startup or IIT team that passes can supply modules to any court, paid per verified case at a published price (How the government buys), and is de-certified within 7 days of a failed audit (Aadhaar playbook). The judiciary owns the model, the data and the servers, all hosted in India.

Timeline

First 30 days:

• Parliament passes the Fast Justice Act. The e-Committee issues model rules that every High Court adopts.
• AI triage of all pending cases is completed and bucket lists are published per court.
• A1 fine offers go out through the virtual courts.
• The Supreme Court publishes the national costs scale; every judgment from day 31 carries a costs order.
• Recruitment of 20,000 AI clerks and 2,500 additional judges starts. Undertrial review committees complete their first Section 479 review.

Within 1 year:

• Bucket A is cleared: about 40% of pending cases, or about 2.2 crore (estimate).
• The total pending falls below 3.5 crore (estimate: 5.4 crore minus 2.2 crore of Bucket A, with new filings matched by normal disposals).
• Every new serious-crime trial finishes within 60 days (90 with the one extension), every commercial case within 90 days and every insolvency within 180 days.
• Undertrials fall below 50% of prisoners.

Outcomes after year 1: Bucket C trials, about 20% of the backlog (estimate), are cleared by the additional benches over the following 2 years, and new judge vacancies are filled as they arise so the backlog does not return.

Guardrails

• Citation lock: every line of an AI summary or draft links to a record page or a statute. An unlinked line is deleted automatically. Any fake citation found triggers an audit of that module within 7 days.
• Draft quality audit: each quarter the High Court's inspecting judge re-reads a random 2% of each judge's AI-assisted judgments. Above 2% material errors, that judge loses AI drafts for 3 months and is retrained. Each court publishes its rate of drafts adopted unchanged next to its error rate.
• Draft load: at most 8 A2 drafts per judge per working day.
• Bias audit: every quarter, AI draft outcomes are compared by caste, religion, gender and region. Any gap above 5 percentage points pauses that module until it is fixed.
• No AI drafts in death, life or terror cases.
• Death sentences: a mitigation report in 100% of cases; execution only after High Court confirmation, a Supreme Court appeal and a mercy decision within 90 days.
• Judge targets: each judge's disposal rate is published monthly. The High Court reviews any judge below 70% of target.
• Trial extensions: at most one, of 30 days, by written order; every court publishes its extension rate monthly.
• Costs scale: published, tied to claim value and the same in every court; a costs order is reviewable on appeal only once, within 30 days.
• No chilling of honest cases: each High Court publishes, every quarter, how many malice findings it made and how many were reversed on appeal. A reversal rate above 10% triggers a review of that court's practice.
• Lawyer strikes: remote hearings continue during any strike. Costs for extra adjournments fall on the party, not the lawyer.

Limits to know

The power to pardon (Articles 72 and 161) is in the Constitution, so ordinary law can only set the 90-day deadline for mercy petitions; narrowing the pardon for whole-life sentences to fresh evidence of innocence needs the Chapter 28 amendment, and courts can still review pardon decisions (Epuru Sudhakar, 2006). The death penalty for rape that does not kill can be enacted, but the courts' "rarest of rare" test means many such sentences will be reduced to life on appeal.

Sources: IANS: pendency at 31 Dec 2025 by court level · Moneylife: total pendency across courts · Bar & Bench: 26 SC cases pending 30+ years · The Law Advice: 22 judges per million · ThePrint: India Justice Report 2025, 15 judges per million · ThePrint: district court sanctioned and working strength, July 2026 · Moneylife: 74% of prisoners undertrials · Financial Express: IBC 603 days · Moneylife: NCLTs need nearly 10 years, Economic Survey · ThePrint: 128 death sentences in 2025 · The Wire: 95% of 2025 death sentences flawed · Newslaundry: 564 on death row · NewKerala: 660 crore pages digitised · India Education Diary: virtual courts, 5.26 crore challans · US Department of Justice: Speedy Trial Act · University of Brasília: VICTOR project · SpicyIP: Kerala HC AI guidelines · SCC Online: Supreme Court draft AI regulations 2026 · eCourtsIndia: $70 billion cost of delay (estimate) · US Courts: Chapter 11 bankruptcy basics