India’s Courts Don’t Need Toughness. They Need Speed.

India’s Justice System Isn’t Too Strict. It’s Too Slow to Matter.

There’s a conversation India refuses to have honestly: our courts are designed as if every dispute is a constitutional moment. As if every judge’s order must be written to survive scrutiny by the Supreme Court. As if every procedural safeguard is sacred even when the system collapses under its own weight.

And then we act shocked when people stop believing in courts.

We keep calling this a “justice system problem.” It’s more accurate to call it a justice distribution problem. In practice, access to functioning justice is rationed—by time, money, endurance, and proximity to power. The rich can survive the slowness. The poor can’t. So they either settle under coercion, give up, or live under the shadow of police discretion and local muscle.

That’s why the uncomfortable question matters: is a high-standard, theoretically perfect court system worth it if it delivers nothing on time? Because at some point, “high standards” becomes a moral vanity project.

The trade-off nobody wants to admit: accuracy vs throughput

Every justice system balances two competing goals:

• Accuracy and fairness: getting it right
• Throughput and accessibility: getting it done

India has optimized for accuracy on paper and failed catastrophically at throughput in reality. That mismatch is not a small glitch—it’s the whole story.

A case that takes 12–20 years isn’t “slow justice.” It’s effectively no justice for most people. It’s justice that arrives after the damage has already become permanent: careers derailed, family property drained in legal fees, victims exhausted, accused trapped as undertrials, witnesses gone, evidence stale.

At that point the system isn’t delivering fairness. It’s delivering attrition.

This is where the phrase “some justice is better than no justice” stops sounding like a compromise and starts sounding like basic common sense. A flawed but functioning court system can still create predictability, discourage vigilantism, and reduce the incentive to lean on police “instant justice.” A perfect-but-inaccessible system encourages corruption and coercion because it makes lawful remedies impractical.

Justice delayed isn’t just justice denied. It’s justice inverted.

“High standards” aren’t the same as “misaligned standards”

One reason this debate feels taboo is because it gets framed dishonestly: either you want high standards, or you want chaos. Either you want rigorous courts, or you want kangaroo courts.

That’s not the real choice.

The real issue is where and how those standards are applied.

India behaves as if every judge—especially at the lower level—must operate with the same intellectual posture as an apex court. But most disputes in district courts are not precedent-setting puzzles. They are ordinary conflicts where citizens need decisive closure:

• property and possession
• rent and tenancy
• cheque and recovery disputes
• assault and local criminal matters
• family disputes
• straightforward contract breaches

These don’t require “jurisprudential poetry.” They require basic fairness, consistency, and speed. A system that can’t resolve routine disputes quickly is not “high standard.” It’s miscalibrated.

Which brings us to a painful detail that people whisper about and then move on: even judicial officers and lawyers struggle to clear certain exams and filters, especially at the lower levels. That’s not proof that “standards are high.” It can also be proof that the standards are selecting the wrong traits.

If exams over-index on memorization and under-index on judgment and decision-making, you don’t get better judges—you get fewer judges. And when you get fewer judges, you get backlogs. When you get backlogs, you get adjournment culture. And once adjournments become strategy, the system becomes a playground for anyone who can afford time.

That is not excellence. That is a bottleneck disguised as merit.

Why hasn’t India changed this? Fear is the excuse, not the cause.

A popular theory is that faster, simpler justice would lead to more errors, and more errors would lead to public outrage, media storms, and law-and-order problems.

Sure, fear exists. But it’s not the real blocker.

If public backlash were truly intolerable, India wouldn’t tolerate what it already tolerates:

• massive case pendency
• undertrials spending years inside for minor allegations
• civil cases that outlive litigants
• outcomes shaped by fatigue more than merit

People already live with arbitrariness—police discretion, corruption, intimidation, and delay. Ordinary citizens don’t expect perfection; they expect closure. The “we must avoid visible errors at all costs” attitude is largely elite projection.

The deeper reason reform doesn’t happen is uglier: institutional self-interest plus path dependence.

The legal ecosystem benefits from slowness

If you want to understand why simplification is resisted, stop treating the system like a machine and start treating it like a marketplace.

• Lawyers profit from delay.
  More hearings mean more fees. Adjournments are not an accident; they are leverage. Procedural complexity keeps laypeople dependent and makes litigation a profession-controlled domain. Any reform that reduces steps, limits adjournments, or creates alternate tracks is seen as a threat to the professional monopoly.

• Judicial culture is trained in an elite model.
  Higher courts shape the norms: long orders, dense reasoning, excessive caution. Lower courts replicate that because legitimacy flows downward. The quiet assumption is that “seriousness” equals complexity, and speed equals sloppiness.

• The system can’t imagine subtractive reform.
  We inherited a legal structure built for control, not access. Since independence, most reforms have been additive: more laws, more procedures, more layers, more appeals. Every new safeguard becomes permanent. Removing steps feels like vandalism, even when the system is collapsing.

So the status quo persists not because it’s working, but because it sustains professional power and intellectual prestige.

Accountability is upside down: speed creates risk, delay creates safety

There’s also a blunt incentive problem that rarely gets stated clearly.

Judges and officers are scrutinized for:

• a controversial ruling
• a judgment that gets reversed
• a decision that becomes a headline

They are not meaningfully punished for:

• endless adjournments
• delays that stretch for years
• remands that keep pushing resolution into the future

So rational behavior becomes predictable: delay safely, decide cautiously, write defensively. Speed increases personal risk. Delay does not.

And once that becomes the norm, you can’t fix it with motivational speeches about “clearing pendency.” You need structural changes that reward resolution and penalize procedural abuse.

Politically, court reform has low payoff—and police theatrics have high payoff

Justice reform is slow, technical, and politically expensive. It threatens powerful lobbies. And even if done well, the benefits show up gradually—not as an immediate headline.

By contrast, executive action and police-centered “tough on crime” theatrics look decisive. They are visible. They signal control. They win narratives. And they don’t require the political class to pick a fight with entrenched legal institutions.

So you get a dangerous substitution: instead of courts delivering timely justice, the state performs law and order through policing and spectacle.

That’s not just bad governance. It’s a slow-motion admission that the courts are not delivering what society needs.

A sane direction isn’t “lower standards.” It’s tiering standards properly.

This debate gets poisoned because people imagine only two options: perfect justice or mob justice. The real option is building tiered justice that matches the complexity of disputes.

A functional approach looks like this:

• Fast-track local justice for routine disputes

  • simpler procedures
  • time-bound decisions
  • fewer adjournments
  • limited appeals

• Reserve elite standards for higher courts

  • appellate scrutiny where it matters
  • constitutional and precedent-setting cases
  • complex legal questions that genuinely require depth

• Accept that lower levels will have some error rate That sounds scary until you admit the truth: error already exists. It’s just hidden behind delay, exhaustion, and unequal bargaining power. Appeals should exist, but not as infinite ladders that turn procedure into punishment.

• Measure courts on outcomes, not prose If legitimacy is tied to long, defensive writing rather than timely enforcement and predictable resolution, you are rewarding the wrong behavior.

The point isn’t to romanticize “good enough” justice. It’s to admit that perfectionism becomes cruelty when it blocks access.

Conclusion

India doesn’t lack laws or lofty standards. It lacks a justice system that ordinary people can actually use within a human lifetime. A faster, simpler court structure wouldn’t destroy legitimacy—it would restore it by making law feel real again. The biggest risk isn’t that courts might deliver imperfect justice; it’s that people stop believing courts can deliver justice at all.