Supreme Court releases pendency figures from June-September 2012 63 of pending matters not ready for hearing by Court

As per figures available on the Supreme Court of India’s website, the number of pending matters has seen an increase of 3.29 per cent through the months of June-September, 2012. The latest statistics show that out of a total of 63,749 matters pending before the Supreme Court, 40,134 matters cannot be listed before the Courts since the same are either not “complete” or not “ready” for hearing. This would mean that nearly 63 per cent of all pending matters are not ready to be heard by the Court..As per figures available on the Supreme Court of India’s website, the number of pending matters has seen an increase of 3.29 per cent through the months of June-September, 2012. The latest statistics show that out of a total of 63,749 matters pending before the Supreme Court, 40,134 matters cannot be listed before the Courts since the same are either not “complete” or not “ready” for hearing. This would mean that nearly 63 per cent of all pending matters are not ready to be heard by the Court..The Supreme Court has defined a “complete” matter as one where all the preliminaries have been completed prior to the admission stage and the matter is ready for hearing while a “ready” matter is one where all the preliminaries have been completed after admission. Essentially, a matter may be declared “not ready” or “not complete” where the procedural requirements (service, process fees, pleadings etc) have not been met..The statistics also reveal the disconcerting fact that, as of September 1,2012, a total of 42 “complete/ready” matters are pending to be heard by a Constitution Bench while a further 167 “complete/ready” matters have been referred to a larger Bench..From May, 2012 to September, 2012 (that is over a period of four months) one Constitution Bench matter and one Referred matter has been disposed of by the Supreme Court. Going by that yardstick, it would take another 14 years to dispose of all cases referred to a Constitutional Bench and 56 years to dispose of all matters referred to a larger Bench of the Supreme Court.