In light of recent judicial pronouncements and empirical evidence, critically examine the state of tribunals in India and the path to their reform.

Tribunals were India's institutional answer to two connected failures of the formal court system: too slow and too uninformed.

Constitutional design (why tribunals were created)

• Arts. 323A and 323B — two tracks of tribunalisation:
  • Art. 323A empowers Parliament to create administrative tribunals for disputes relating to recruitment, conditions of service, and matters of public servants  CAT (Central Administrative Tribunal, 1985) is the primary example;
  • Art. 323B empowers Parliament and state legislatures to create tribunals for taxation, land reforms, industrial disputes, elections, foreign exchange, import-export, and rent matters  (a wider mandate covering economic and commercial disputes.
• Rationale: three original promises:
  • Speed (procedural flexibility, limited adjournments, no appeals to HC directly);
  • Expertise (specialised members combining judicial and technical knowledge);
  • Accessibility (benches closer to litigants than the Supreme Court, lower costs than HC litigation).
• Constitutional validity (L. Chandra Kumar v. UoI (1997)):
  • The Constitution Bench held that tribunal decisions are subject to judicial review by the relevant HC's Division Bench and ultimately the SC, the power of judicial review under Arts. 226 and 32 is part of the Basic Structure and cannot be excluded from courts even by constitutional amendment; This judgment preserved the constitutional order of tribunals within the judicial hierarchy rather than as substitutes for it. The design was sound.

The implementation has systematically violated every premise (DAKSH

State of Tribunals 2025)

• Pendency — the scale of failure:
  • In 2024–25, at least ₹24.72 lakh crore worth of disputes — approximately 7.48% of India's GDP — remain locked in disputes before key commercial tribunals.
  • India's commercial tribunals, including ITAT, NCLT, and Debt Recovery Tribunal, are grappling with a backlog of more than 3.56 lakh cases, worth ₹24.7 lakh crore — being adjudicated by only 350 members.
• Chronic vacancies — the operational paralysis:
  • NCLT benches functioning at 60–70% of sanctioned strength;
  • vacancies in tribunal leadership are the most direct cause of pendency, yet appointments remain executive-controlled without independent oversight
• "Parking spots" for retired officials — Generalization of Expert bodies:
  • the expertise promise of tribunalisation has been subverted by the appointment culture;
  • technical members are selected through executive patronage rather than demonstrated domain knowledge;
• Jurisdictional overlaps and fragmentation:
  • NCLT and DRT overlap on insolvency matters;
  • ITAT and HC overlap on constitutional questions of tax law;
  • CESTAT and ITAT overlap on indirect vs. direct tax disputes;
• Tribunals Reforms Act 2021:
  • Maintained executive dominance over appointments through Search-cum- Selection Committees with significant government representation,
  • 4-year fixed tenures (too short for genuine independence), and Ministry control over funding and infrastructure: effectively making the executive the de facto employer of the adjudicators it appears before.

It is the structural consequence of creating specialised bodies without a coordinating architecture to manage their inter-relationships. The Law Commission's 272nd Report (2017) had itself recommended reducing the number of tribunals and consolidating overlapping jurisdictions — the 2021 Act's rationalisation goal was judicially endorsed; its constitutional execution was not. The 2021 rationalisation

• Merging of tribunals with overlapping mandates (Film Certificate Appellate Tribunal merged with HC; Airport Appellate Tribunal dissolved) reduced the fragmentation problem;
• Standardisation of service conditions was a legitimate administrative goal; The independence crisis (executive control as a structural defect)
• Union of India v. Madras Bar Association (November 19, 2025): The Supreme Court struck down key provisions of the Tribunals Reforms Act 2021 relating to appointment and tenure of tribunal members, holding them unconstitutional.
  • The Court found that Parliament had simply repackaged provisions from the previously invalidated 2021 Tribunal Ordinance without addressing constitutional defects, effectively attempting to override binding Supreme Court judgments.
  • The Court called this an "impermissible legislative override" of its previous judgments and directed the government to establish a National Tribunal Commission.
  • The SC's characterisation — "old wine in a new bottle" — captures the pattern of executive resistance to genuine tribunal independence reform across multiple legislative attempts. Lukmaan IASPW Live
• Union of India v. Madras Bar Association (November 2025): struck down the Act that had simply re-enacted the previously invalidated provisions; the decade-long series reveals a systematic pattern of executive legislative resistance to judicial independence norms for tribunals — five separate judicial corrections without the executive correcting the underlying constitutional defect.
• The conflict of interest (government as litigant and appointer):
  • In the 2019 ruling Rojer Mathew v. South Indian Bank, the Supreme Court held that the executive remains in charge of appointments as well as removals of tribunal members.
  • The ministries that administer the subject matter also control the tribunals that adjudicate disputes in that subject matter — Ministry of Finance controls ITAT (income tax disputes), Ministry of Corporate Affairs controls NCLT (company law disputes), Ministry of Environment controls NGT (environmental disputes); the appointing authority and the primary respondent before each tribunal are the same ministry — a structural conflict of interest that no code of ethics can neutralise. Way forward
• National Tribunal Commission (NTC):
  • The SC directed the Union Government to establish the NTC to ensure transparency and independence.
  • The NTC would serve as the centralised appointment, oversight, and accountability body for all tribunals — analogous to the Judicial

Appointments Commission in the UK — removing Ministry-by-Ministry control and creating an independent institutional guardian for tribunal integrity. SuperKalam

• Security of tenure (minimum 5 years, HC judge equivalence): would structurally insulate tribunal members from the executive whose decisions they adjudicate.
• Funding independence (separate budget line): Tribunal funding managed by parent ministries creates the "funding as leverage" problem; all tribunal budgets should be consolidated under a single parliamentary appropriation managed by the NTC analogous to how the Supreme Court's budget is charged to the Consolidated Fund of India rather than routed through the Ministry of Law and Justice.
• Specialisation requirement (domain expertise verification) Technical members should be required to demonstrate domain expertise through a structured competency assessment by the NTC rather than appointment through executive nomination; the "parking spot" problem identified by DAKSH is directly addressable through a merit-based selection process that the current Ministry-controlled appointment system structurally prevents.

India's tribunals were designed to be escalators and not replacements for the staircase of formal courts, but parallel mechanisms that move faster, require less effort, and bring justice closer to the citizen who needs it. We need to resolve the issues so that these escalators can accelerate the justice delivery mechanisms.