5 min readOct 26, 2026 06:10 PM IST First published on: Oct 26, 2026 at 06:10 PM ISTIt takes an enormous amount of time for a civil dispute to be decided in India. Take the example of the Bombay High Court, where a suit filed in 1947 was finally settled out of court this year, after 79 years in litigation. While this may be an extraordinary time frame, many legal practitioners in Mumbai estimate that a suit filed at the Bombay High Court usually takes more than 20 years to decide.There are many reasons for our slow-paced judicial system, but too much work for too few judges seems to be a big factor. According to the 2011 Census, the population of Maharashtra was 112 million, larger than that of any European country except Russia. The state of Maharashtra has 15 judges per million people, while the Bombay High Court has only 1.9 judges per million people. By contrast, there are about 157 judges per million people in New York state. According to the National Judicial Data Grid, there are currently 648,725 cases pending at the Bombay High Court, of which 9,454 are civil suits. It is nearly impossible for the handful of judges who are assigned the roster of deciding original civil suits to tackle this backlog, not counting new case filings.AdvertisementFrustrated by the failures of state institutions to deliver justice, litigants in countries like Japan and Venezuela turn to extra-judicial remedies. In Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969), the fictional undertaker, Amerigo Bonasera, looks to the mafia don, Vito Corleone, when the courts fail to deliver justice. However, in India, affluent and well-connected litigants to whom money is owed often go to the police and attempt to criminalise their disputes by alleging that their opponent has committed a criminal offence like “cheating” or “breach of trust”.A person who merely breaches a contract to pay money commits none of these offences. So why do the police act on these complaints that often have no obvious criminal angles to them? A litigant offers the police officer a cut if he can get his opponent to settle the case. In fact, it is rumoured that a branch of the police asks for bribes on a “commission basis” to take up such cases. Of course, not all police officers succumb to such temptations.Also Read | India’s power dilemma: Surplus during the day, deficits at nightOnce the police get involved in a civil case, the process is devastatingly fast. Unlike civil suits, where defendants rarely have to go to court in person, the police send a cryptic summons to the “accused” debtor ordering him to come to the police station at short notice. Receiving this summons can itself be quite intimidating. What follows is worse. The police then conduct a “preliminary inquiry”, where an incredible amount of pressure is put on the “accused” debtor to settle the case. At the police station, he is made to wait for hours, where he sees other offenders being verbally or physically abused by the police in more serious cases. He is interrogated menacingly; the police threaten to arrest him, his spouse or family unless he settles the case. After several draining hours, the accused person is sent home and then told to come back again the next day for another harrowing experience.AdvertisementIn the commercial world, time is money. Most people crack in this environment and cases are settled without a First Information Report (FIR) being registered. According to some accounts, 50 per cent of such cases that come to a police station end at the preliminary inquiry stage. Apart from the unpleasant ordeal, the fear of arrest is a potent weapon that gets defendants to settle such cases. Prison conditions in India are deplorable. The risk of reputational loss upon registration of a criminal case is also a factor.Scholars of “law and society” recognise that there is often a wide gap between the “law on the books” and the “law in action”. Criminalising civil cases is considered an “abuse of process” that the Supreme Court has repeatedly deprecated and discouraged. The law in action is something else.you may likeIt would be unfair to blame our understaffed and overworked courts for a system that requires structural and cultural reform. India’s civil justice system is built on a bedrock of archaic procedure. A defendant in India is given every conceivable opportunity to thwart a plaintiff’s attempts at getting a decree. In 1872, the Privy Council remarked that “the difficulties of a litigant in India begin when he has obtained a Decree”. This continues to be true today.All this is pushing frustrated litigants who have access to networks into the arms of police officers (at times, of questionable integrity) who deliver swift, summary “justice” in civil cases — a parallel civil justice delivery mechanism.The writer is an advocate at the Bombay High Court