“Bichar-er jonno opekkha kora — to wait for justice is itself a form of injustice.” — Bengali proverb
Kolkata Judicial & Legal Access
District court pendency, case flow trends, and judge availability in Kolkata
Kolkata's district courts carry 130,500 pending cases and the Calcutta High Court another 248,500. Average pendency runs to 5.1 years, and 18,130 district cases have been waiting more than a decade.
The bottleneck is arithmetic. West Bengal has 12.4 judges per million people against a national average of 21 and Kerala's 30.2, and a quarter of the High Court's sanctioned judge posts sit vacant — 54 judges working against 72 sanctioned. Courts cannot clear faster than they are staffed.
About this data
What this page shows
Pending cases grouped by age bracket, cases instituted against cases disposed from 2018 to 2024, the annual clearance rate, judges per million across states, the civil-criminal split of district pendency, and a summary for the Calcutta High Court. Criminal matters make up 61.5% of district pendency. The clearance rate has recovered strongly, from 80.0% in the pandemic year of 2020 to 93.6% in 2024 — though a rate below 100% means the backlog still grows, which it has every year in this series.
Where the data comes from
National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) dashboard snapshots as at 31 December 2024, the India Justice Report 2022 for judge-strength comparisons, and Calcutta High Court annual reports.
Limitations worth knowing
NJDG publishes a live dashboard but no historical API, so the year-by-year institution and disposal series was curated from snapshots and published reports rather than queried directly; figures are point-in-time and will not match NJDG today. Pendency counts are also sensitive to how cases are registered and consolidated, which varies between court complexes. “Average pendency” is a mean across a very skewed distribution — most cases resolve far faster than 5.1 years, while a long tail waits far longer, so the mean describes neither typical experience well.
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