20 years to resolve a $400 fine? India to block frivolous government litigation

BENGALURU – When Mr Jagdeep Singh filed a petition challenging a government notice that demanded he pay an additional amount for the residential land he was allotted, the middle-aged professional did not expect it to end only 20 years later, with the Supreme Court of India delivering an epic scolding to the state agency for dragging out the petty case. 

Calling the case “frivolous litigation”, the Supreme Court dismissed the appeal by the Haryana Urban Development Authority (Huda) and said Mr Singh owed no money to the agency.

The judges even ordered a rare penalty – imposing a 100,000 rupee (S$1,500) fine on Huda to be paid to the court for wasting its time and 50,000 rupees to Mr Singh as compensation for involving him “in unnecessary litigation”. 

“It is because of (the) impersonal and irresponsible attitude of the officers, who want to put everything to court and shirk taking decisions,” said the May 2023 verdict from India’s apex court. 

Mr Singh’s case involved 26,880 rupees that Huda kept demanding as unpaid dues for 20 years, but which the courts repeatedly ruled he did not owe. The Supreme Court verdict said that “the amount spent on litigation would be much more (than the demanded amount)”. 

India’s Supreme Court has reason to be so irritable. It has a backlog of 83,000 cases as at August 2024 – the highest recorded to date. 

The government, including ministries, agencies and the bureaucracy at the central, state and district levels, is a litigant in 73 per cent of all cases in the Supreme Court. 

In June, Law Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal finalised a long-awaited National Litigation Policy to “unclog the wheels of justice” and prevent the government from being “a compulsive litigant”, as the previous law minister Ashwani Kumar called it.

With more than 45 million pending cases across all courts, India desperately needs more courtrooms and technological upgrades, as well as 50 judges per million people to cope with the current case volume. It has only 21 judges per million. 

But more courtrooms and judges may not be enough to shrink the pile of pending cases “as long as the default setting of state agencies is to keep filing appeals”, said senior lawyer Aditya Sondhi. 

A majority of litigation involving the government is filed by citizens challenging state inaction in issues such as pension, salary or land acquisition.

But analysts said habitual and unnecessary challenges by state agencies against court orders all the way up to the Supreme Court are adding to the drain on the system in the world’s biggest democracy.

While there is no official data, some studies estimate that the government has spent over 5 billion rupees as litigation expenses over the last decade.  

Lawyers and legal scholars say it is the bureaucrats’ aversion to taking any risks and lack of limits on court fees that make government officials so litigious by habit.

A lot of cases that get filed in the Supreme Court ought not to be filed at all, said Dr Sondhi. 

In September 2023, Supreme Court judges dismissed one such appeal by the Karnataka state government and ordered it to pay legal costs to a family whose land the state had acquired and not paid for. 

“Merely because the officers of the state government do not have to pay for the litigation from their own pockets, they cannot be permitted to file such frivolous petitions and harass the landowners, who have already lost their valuable land,” the Supreme Court order read.

Senior lawyer Sanjay Hegde recalled the case of Ms Akku Sherigara and Ms Leela Challa, two contract toilet cleaners at a government teachers’ training institute in Udupi district in Karnataka, who were paid a meagre sum of 15 rupees per month, well below the legal minimum wage.

They were fired when they requested a full salary.

It took 42 years of struggle and a Supreme Court order for the women to get their unpaid wages of three million rupees each from the Karnataka state education department.

By the time they got their dues in 2014, the women were elderly and one of them had had a paralytic stroke. 

Mr Hegde noted that governments “do not honour verdicts and instead appeal them as a way to keep the issue pending” as officials are wary of payouts becoming precedents for claims from other citizens. 

“The moment there is a financial implication, like in a pension matter, an allotment of a site or a tender issue, government officers like to play it safe, and let the courts decide, even if the legal cost is not proportionate,” Dr Sondhi said. 

Such litigation has serious implications beyond cost and delay.

In criminal or politically sensitive cases, the police or government agencies tend to contest the bail that courts give the accused. 

“The government seeks adjournments constantly, strategically or because the state lawyers can’t cope with the volume of cases they’re handling. The accused is forced to remain in custody for longer, which has a direct impact on their liberty,” said Dr Sondhi. 

The heavy backlog has also “allowed the court to avoid difficult cases by the simple expedient of not deciding such cases at all”, said Dr Aparna Chandra, associate professor of law at the National Law School, Bengaluru, and the co-author of the 2023 book Court On Trial: A Data-Driven Account Of The Supreme Court Of India. 

For example, petitions against the universal biometric identity Aadhaar and controversial electoral bonds for poll funding took years to be heard, by which time the contested policies were rolled out, “allowing illegalities to continue unchecked in the meantime”, she added. 

The Indian government has set monetary limits for government departments filing appeals related to taxes in the tax tribunals, High Courts and Supreme Court. Only cases involving a tax amount of more than 50 million rupees can go to the Supreme Court. 

But there are no similar limits on litigation fees or the number of appeals that can be filed for civil or criminal cases. 

Some states have guidelines for efficient and responsible government litigation, but “there are no consequences if the rules are flouted”, said Mr Hegde. 

The new National Litigation Policy hopes to reduce the average case duration from 15 years to an ambitious three years, by prohibiting delaying tactics by government agencies.

It will also prioritise “conciliation over confrontation”, which means using more out-of-court methods to resolve cases. Although the policy is yet to be passed, legal analysts say it is the only way forward.