Shekhar Choudhary

The Diagnosis

Its mind boggling that India had some 5.4 crore cases pending across its courts at the close of 2025 (Data for India, 2026). More than 80,000 cases in the High Courts alone have crossed 30 long years of legal battle, and 312 High Court judgeships stood vacant as of March 2026 (Business Standard, 2026). The system is cracking. But an All India Judicial Service would not by itself clear this backlog: it does not create posts, which is a budgetary question, and it does not quicken procedure. What it changes is how judges are chosen. That is a smaller claim than the one usually made for it — and a far more defensible one. If we trace the origins of the modern judiciary in India, the British establishment of judiciary in different Presidencies goes back to the seventeenth century, beginning with the Mayor’s Court at Madras in 1687–88 and made uniform across the three Presidency towns by the Charter of 1726 (LawFoyer, 2024). The system we inherited has not changed much in working and ethos. Recruitment to the subordinate judiciary remains a state-by-state exercise run on each High Court’s timetable, and only cosmetic changes have been brought in to serve the eyes of public scrutiny.

An Idea Older Than Most of Its Critics

The Law Commission first recommended an all-India cadre for the judiciary in its 14th Report in 1958, and returned to it in the 116th Report, devoted entirely to the formation of such a service. The Forty-Second Constitutional Amendment Act, 1976 inserted clauses (3) and (4) into Article 312 to enable it, confining the service to posts no lower than district judge. The Supreme Court then directed its creation in All India Judges’ Association v. Union of India (1992), instructing the Union to take appropriate steps. More than three decades later, nothing has been done — and the judge-strength gap identified by the 120th Report, which recommended 50 judges per million population, remains unclosed at roughly 21.

The Many Objections, and Far More Solutions

Four objections are usually raised. Each is serious, but each is answerable.

First, that it will end provincialisation. The argument is that state-wise recruitment gives candidates from every state an equal playing field. This has real force and should be met squarely: because Article 312(3) confines the service to posts of district judge and above, an All India Judicial Service would occupy precisely the promotion posts that state judicial officers presently rise into. The answer is not to deny the cost but to design for it — by filling only a fixed share of district judgeships through the national examination and reserving the rest for promotion from the state cadre, both channels stay open. Against that cost stands a plainer fact: a candidate in a state that has not held a judicial services examination in years has no field to play on at all.

Second, that it will kill the native understanding of local law and language. Each state has its own language, and the subordinate judiciary works mostly on facts, local custom and vernacular testimony rather than pure questions of law. This is the strongest objection, but it is a problem of design, not of principle. Language training can be built into the judicial training institutes, and states could be grouped into contiguous cadres rather than one national pool — Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand with Uttar Pradesh forming one; Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra another. These states already see an interflow of people across linguistic lines, and a judge posted within such a zone can pick up the working language with training.

Third, that it will centralise judicial administration. The precedent invoked is the Union–judiciary conflict over the National Judicial Appointments Commission, struck down in Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association v. Union of India (2015). But this objection conflates recruitment with control. Article 235 vests in the High Courts control over the subordinate judiciary — posting, promotion, leave and discipline — and an All India Judicial Service need not disturb any of it. Only recruitment under Articles 233 and 234 would change, and Article 312(4) allows Parliament to make that change without an amendment under Article 368. What the Court defended in the NJAC case was its primacy over appointments to the constitutional courts, which this reform leaves untouched. The honest cost is narrower than the objection suggests: the High Court’s consultative role in direct district-judge appointments would be diluted.

Fourth, that there are other recourses. Raising the retirement age, expanding online courts where judges dispose of cases from home — these are worth doing, and an All India Judicial Service prevents none of them. But they address the volume of work, not who enters the judiciary.

Opacity in the Present Architecture

The case for changing recruitment rests partly on what the present architecture conceals. The Law Commission’s 230th Report recorded the phenomenon of ‘uncle judges’, recommending that judges whose relatives practise in a High Court should not be appointed to that same High Court, and the Collegium has more recently weighed a proposal to stop recommending the kith and kin of sitting and former judges (ThePrint, 2025). Whatever one concludes about its extent, it describes selection mediated by networks rather than by open competition. A published syllabus, a common examination and a public merit list are not a complete answer to that, but they are a different kind of process — and the difference is the point. One substantive feature of our democracy is the representation of different groups — caste, religion, gender — in Parliament. When our police, administration and other government services already carry this element, why not our judiciary? Of the 849 High Court judges appointed between 2018 and March 2026, only 33 (3.89%) belonged to Scheduled Castes, 17 (2%) to Scheduled Tribes and 104 (12.25%) to Other Backward Classes, while women accounted for just 3% of sitting Supreme Court judges (The Observer Post, 2026). Those figures describe the constitutional courts rather than the district judiciary this service would recruit, but they show what an unrepresentative bench looks like at the end of a pipeline that begins below.

The honest difficulty is that a national examination does not by itself guarantee a broader bench. It could as easily advantage graduates of national law universities and candidates who can afford metropolitan coaching over those entering from district bars. Whether such a service widens or narrows access therefore depends on design: whether reservation is built in without displacing state-specific backward classes, and whether the examination is held in Indian languages rather than English alone. Meet those conditions and it broadens entry; ignore them and it merely relocates privilege.

Conclusion

We need to see the judiciary from the point of view of its outcomes, rather than an ivory-tower view which only stalls its democratisation. India, a nation still in the making, becomes a nation for all only when its institutions are inclusive and transparent. It serves no purpose to hand our people the institutions of the nineteenth century to meet the aspirations of the twenty-first. The real Viksit Bharat can stand only on the edifice of a strong, open and inclusive judiciary — as the motto of the Supreme Court itself declares, Yato Dharmastato Jayah, ‘where there is dharma, there is victory.’ That victory is real only when the judiciary upholds this vision of justice for all.

The author is an Assistant Professor (Selection Grade) at UPES School of Law, Dehradun. He can be reached at shekhar.choudhary@ddn.upes.ac.in