Supreme Court releases pendency figures up till January 1 2013 6202 of the pending matters not ready for hearing by Court

The Supreme Court has released the statistics pertaining to the matters pending before it as on January 1, 2013. As per the figures available on the Supreme Court of India’s website, out of a total of 66,692 matters pending before the Supreme Court, 41,369 matters cannot be listed before the Court since the same are incomplete or are not ready for hearing as they require ‘preliminaries’ to be completed..The number of pending matters has increased by 2042 (3.15%) when compared with the figures as on October 1, 2012. However, the percentage of “incomplete”/ “not ready matters” has seen a slight decrease from 63.02% on October 1, 2012 to 62.02% on January 1, 2013..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..As per the statistics out of the 66,692 pending matters, 37,659 are admission matters while 29,033 are regular hearing matters. Out of the 37,659 admission matters, 11,421 are “complete” while 26,238 are “incomplete”. Out of the 29,033 regular hearing matters, 13,902 are “ready” while 15,131 are “not ready”..The statistics also reveal that, as of January 1, 2013, a total of 44 “complete/ready” matters are pending to be heard by a Constitution Bench while a further 161 “complete/ready” matters have been referred to a larger Bench..From October, 2012 to December, 2012 (that is over a period of three months) three Referred matters have been disposed of by the Supreme Court while Constitution Bench matters have increased by one.