“Bichar-er jonno opekkha kora — to wait for justice is itself a form of injustice.” — Bengali proverb
Courts & Case Pendency: West Bengal and the Calcutta High Court
Pendency, clearance and judge strength for West Bengal's district courts (state-wide) and the Calcutta High Court. Kolkata-only court figures are not publicly available.
Courts in Kolkata are not reported separately. The nearest published figures cover the state: West Bengal's district and subordinate courts had 3,762,592 cases pending on 1 December 2025, according to National Judicial Data Grid figures given to the Rajya Sabha. Some 83% of them were criminal matters. The Calcutta High Court, which sits in Kolkata, had another 216,396 main cases pending on 31 July 2026, by its own monthly statement.
The backlog is growing because filings outpace disposals. In 2024 the state's subordinate courts cleared 64 cases for every 100 filed, against 96 nationally (India Justice Report 2025), and 55.8% of their pending cases were more than three years old. Capacity is part of the story. West Bengal has 11.1 working judges per million people, the lowest of the large and mid-sized states and well below the national 15.9. On 27 November 2025 the High Court had 44 judges working against 72 sanctioned posts.
About this data
What this page shows
Pending cases in all West Bengal district and subordinate courts at year-end 2021 to 2024 and on 1 December 2025; the annual case clearance rate for those courts in 2018–2022 and 2024; working judges per million people across states; the civil and criminal split of district-court pendency; and a summary of the Calcutta High Court's pendency, judge strength and clearance rate. None of the district-court figures are specific to Kolkata.
Where the data comes from
District-court pendency, its civil and criminal split, and the High Court's NJDG year-end series come from Rajya Sabha Unstarred Questions 582 and 587 (answered 4 December 2025). High Court sanctioned and working strength comes from Rajya Sabha Starred Question 47 (as on 27 November 2025). All three are in the Department of Justice's compilation of Winter Session 2025 replies. Clearance rates for 2018–2022 come from the India Justice Report 2022 (Fig. 30). The 2024 clearance rate, the share of cases pending over three years and the judges-per-million comparison come from the India Justice Report 2025 (Table 5 and Fig. 7). The High Court's current pendency is from its monthly “Institution, Disposal and Pendency of Main Cases” statement as on 31 July 2026.
Limitations worth knowing
NJDG's district-level dashboard sits behind a captcha, so Kolkata's own courts (City Civil, City Sessions, Small Causes and others) could not be read and no Kolkata-only figure is shown. No source publishes West Bengal's cases instituted and disposed by year, a breakdown of pending cases by age bracket, or an average pendency in years. Those charts have been removed rather than estimated, and the 2023 clearance rate is missing for the same reason. Two Rajya Sabha answers given on the same day disagree for late 2024: USQ 582 gives 3,307,196 pending on 1 December 2024, while USQ 587 gives 2,923,585 on 31 December 2024. Both give 3,762,592 for 1 December 2025, so the size of the 2024 to 2025 rise depends on which you trust. The High Court's own statement and NJDG also differ a little at any given date (199,281 on NJDG on 1 December 2025; 209,962 in the court's statement on 31 December 2025), though they matched exactly at the end of 2023. The Department of Justice's “about 21 judges per million” (Rajya Sabha USQ 2043, December 2024) counts sanctioned posts against the 2011 population. It is not comparable with the working-judge figures here. Judge-strength data for West Bengal's subordinate courts is published together with the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
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