Courts: Adjournments have real costs, avoid them to clear pendency
“Based on my 35 years of legal experience, I can say that adjournments is the biggest reason for pendency,” Senior advocate and Central Bureau of Investigation Special Public Prosecutor DP Singh said.
The three new criminal laws lay down timelines for conducting trials and delivering verdicts, and provisions for summary trials, and trial and conviction in absence.
That an iconic Bollywood dialogue – “taarikh pe taarikh” – is possibly more relevant now than it was when spoken on screen more than three decades ago, sums up a central challenge of the country’s justice delivery system.
At the beginning of 2026, the pendency in Delhi’s lower courts is 15.85 lakh cases, a number that is expected to rise through the year as old cases crawl through the system and new ones are instituted every day. From 2018 to 2025, the difference between the numbers of cases instituted and disposed of was 1.3 lakh every year on average. An army of judges – more than 700 – hear around 28,000 cases every day, and around 60% of cases are disposed of within a year. Even so, the pendency keeps piling up.
The three new criminal laws lay down specific timelines for conducting trials and delivering verdicts, and provisions for summary trials, and trial and conviction in absence.
But institutional reform is needed for these changes to make a difference. For instance, cheque bounce cases, which have to be disposed of in six months, have risen by more than a lakh over the past year, and today make up four in 10 cases pending in the capital’s courts.
WAY FORWARD
“Based on my 35 years of legal experience, I can say that adjournments is the biggest reason for pendency,” Senior advocate and Central Bureau of Investigation Special Public Prosecutor DP Singh said.
“Adjournments beget adjournments – when an adjournment is granted during the course of arguments with weeks or months between hearings, the hearing practically starts afresh, as the judge has to be given a perspective on what was argued the previous time, and an argument that could have taken 2-3 hours takes 15-20 hours,” Singh said.
According to Singh, procedural reforms could help speed up things. “In cases of bail, for example, adjournments can be avoided if there is advance notice. Both sides should come with status reports or replies…and the matter should be decided on that day itself unless there is a specific query.” he said.
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To avoid adjournments, the High Court and Supreme Court can bunch similar issues together, Singh said. “Arguments can be made timebound. Judges should be given notes of arguments and all parties should exchange judgments beforehand. Judges should stop lawyers from repeating arguments especially if they are irrelevant. When arguments are short, adjournments would cease to exist,” he said.
Nirbhay Thakur is a Senior Correspondent with The Indian Express who primarily covers district courts in Delhi and has reported on the trials of many high-profile cases since 2023.
Professional Background
Education: Nirbhay is an economics graduate from Delhi University.
Beats: His reporting spans the trial courts, and he occasionally interviews ambassadors and has a keen interest in doing data stories.
Specializations: He has a specific interest in data stories related to courts.
Core Strength: Nirbhay is known for tracking long-running legal sagas and providing meticulous updates on high-profile criminal trials.
Recent notable articles
In 2025, he has written long form articles and two investigations. Along with breaking many court stories, he has also done various exclusive stories.
1) A long form on Surender Koli, accused in the Nithari serial killings of 2006. He was acquitted after spending 2 decades in jail. was a branded man. Deemed the “cannibal" who allegedly lured children to his employer’s house in Noida, murdered them, and “ate their flesh” – his actions cited were cited as evidence of human depravity at its worst. However, the SC acquitted him finding various lapses in the investigation. The Indian Express spoke to his lawyers and traced the 2 decades journey.
2) For decades, the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) has been at the forefront of the Government’s national rankings, placed at No. 2 over the past two years alone. It has also been the crucible of campus activism, its protests often spilling into national debates, its student leaders going on to become the faces and voices of political parties of all hues and thoughts. The Indian Express looked at all court cases spanning over two decades and did an investigation.
3) Investigation on the 700 Delhi riots cases. The Indian Express found that in 17 of 93 acquittals (which amounted to 85% of the decided cases) in Delhi riots cases, courts red-flag ‘fabricated’ evidence and pulled up the police.
Signature Style
Nirbhay’s writing is characterized by its procedural depth. He excels at summarizing 400-page chargesheets and complex court orders into digestible news for the general public.
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