Written by: Siddarth Rao Errabelli4 min readApr 13, 2026 06:20 AM IST First published on: Apr 13, 2026 at 06:20 AM ISTThe announcements of new high court complexes in Assam, Maharashtra and Telangana present a significant opportunity to reimagine what courts should look like in a rapidly changing India. They also offer an opportunity to think afresh about better design and architecture of courthouses, which can, in turn, improve case pendency and litigants’ perceptions of justice.The grandiose architecture of India’s courts was conceived in colonial times to reinforce the hierarchical relationship between the state and its subjects. They were built at a time when courts had a small fraction of today’s case load. The Supreme Court, for instance, had 14 judges and 2,656 pending cases in 1960. Today, it has 86,000 cases and 34 sanctioned judges. High courts together have 6.3 million pending cases, while over 46 million cases are pending in the lower courts.AdvertisementMeeting this high case load has required space, resulting in a haphazard expansion of court spaces. Such retrofitting leads to what the legal scholar Patrícia Branco terms “judicial slumisation” — a built environment in which lawyers and visitors have to elbow through teeming, long-winding corridors and aisles to get into courtrooms. They strain to hear the queries of the judge, and must speak loudly enough to ensure that their voice carries across overcrowded rooms with bad acoustics. A more welcoming court complex would make litigants and victims of crime feel that they were received and heard better, improving perceptions of justice delivery.The physical spaces, if designed well, could create an enabling environment for all stakeholders of the justice system —judges, lawyers, litigants, and the court registry staff. It can contribute towards improving the disposal rates of cases. Indian courts operate on a docket system, where cases are called based on a serial number order rather than at a fixed time. Lawyers might have more than one matter in different courts on a given day and are often unable to move fast enough between courts when they have clashing hearings. This derails the serial order and work flow of judges, sometimes delaying the case for days. It is no wonder, then, that junior lawyers are first trained to seek “pass-overs” and argue in “proxy” while their seniors juggle appearances between courts. A better integrated complex can obviate these difficulties.The barriers in court complexes start right from overcrowded parking spaces that delay admission into the court complex. Access to courts is oftentimes not conducive for persons with special needs. The lack of space has led to incongruous situations where high courts pass orders under the Maternity Benefit Act 1961, while many of them do not have crèches mandated under the very same act.AdvertisementWhen the United States went through a reconstruction of its court buildings after the New Deal in the 1930s, and Japan rebuilt the Tokyo District Court in the “bubble era” of its economic prosperity in the 1980s, both countries devised design guidelines for courtroom construction. India, too, must seek out experts in the field to architecturally re-imagine court complexes outside of their colonial legacy, centring them around all stakeholders, and not just around the sanctioned strength of judges.Inspiration could also be drawn from the citizen-centric Constitutional Court of South Africa, the High Court of Australia, and the Kununurra courthouse in north-western Australia, which seek to blend in with and reflect the values of the local community.you may likeThe National Case Management System (NCMS) 2024 recognised that court infrastructure must also be augmented and improved to meet the needs of litigants, lawyers, judges, and court staff. However, the NCMS constituted a sub-committee on Court Development Planning System (Infrastructure & Budgeting), which focuses only on model plans for district courts and taluka court complexes, while overlooking the reconstruction of high courts and integrated court complexes.As more states move to rebuild overburdened high courts, the lack of guidelines could result in poorly designed courthouses that create more problems than they resolve.The writer is visiting researcher at Harvard Law School, Massachusetts, US. He is studying the relationship between courthouse architecture and judicial efficacy