Bad news: in September 2011 the Supreme Court booked an apparent net deficit of more than 1,000 cases in its monthly pendency clearance efforts. If this rate were kept up, pending cases could double in less than five years.

The total number of pending cases at the apex court increased by a little over 400 – the second-highest figure this financial year at 56,304.

Worryingly, this total included 586 cases that were cleared in previous months but were only recorded in the statistics this month. This could be a sign of inefficiency in recording cases, or an admin back-office clean-up that swept up and recorded previous cases, as all previous months’ figures for the recording backlog were around the 100 mark.

Without this boost from previous months, the truer figure for the Supreme Court’s September gross clearance rate (GCR) is that in the last month 1,001 more cases came through its doors than left its halls (unless next month will show another large recording backlog).

One might wonder what the effect will be, if any, of the absence of the prolific case clearer Justice Markandey Katju, who has now retired from the bench to head up the Press Council of India, and whether the new judges will pick up the slack.

Also of concern is that while September had a number of court holidays, next month is even worse. With this very week off and Diwali coming up later in October, next month’s Pendency Project could have more sad news to report.

*Note: total disposed cases includes cases that may have been disposed of in previous months but were not recorded in the system due to administrative reasons.