After more than two decades of court hearings, missing files and repeated arguments, Sanjay Goel says justice for his murdered mother remains trapped in India’s overwhelmed legal system.
The Vancouver resident has travelled countless times to Mumbai since 2003, when his mother, Dr. Asha Goel — a Canadian citizen — was beaten to death while visiting family. Despite a confession from one alleged attacker and DNA evidence pointing overwhelmingly to a suspect, the case has yet to reach a verdict.
“It’s beyond comprehension,” Goel said, gesturing toward stacks of handwritten court documents. “Files disappear. Then they turn up months later.”
Goel and his family believed the case would be straightforward. Instead, they have endured hundreds of hearings, with witnesses dying or becoming too frail to testify as the years drag on.
“It’s like Groundhog Day,” he said. “The same arguments are heard again and again.”
His experience reflects a much larger crisis. India’s courts are buckling under a backlog of more than 54 million pending cases — criminal and civil — according to the National Judicial Data Grid. The number has doubled in just a decade, with millions of cases stalled for over 10 years. At the current pace, experts say it would take centuries to clear the docket.
“There is desperation,” said Gautam Patel, a recently retired judge of the Bombay High Court. “The backlog has become so monumental that we’re almost in panic mode.”
The scale of delay is staggering, even in a country of 1.4 billion people. In 2023, India finally disposed of its oldest pending case — a bank liquidation lawsuit filed in 1948 — simply because no one appeared at the final hearing.
Legal experts say the system is collapsing under its own weight. Retired Supreme Court justice Madan Lokur said no serious effort has been made to tackle the backlog, despite repeated warnings. In 2016, then–chief justice Tirath Singh Thakur publicly pleaded with Prime Minister Narendra Modi for more judges, breaking down as he described an “avalanche” of cases. At the time, the backlog stood at about 27 million — half of today’s total.
Compounding the problem is the fact that the Indian government itself is the country’s largest litigant, involved in roughly half of all cases. Successive administrations have pledged reform, but progress has been minimal.
For Mumbai activist Sudhir Dhawale, the consequences of delay were devastating. Arrested in 2018 under India’s controversial Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, he spent more than six years in jail — including two years in solitary confinement — waiting for bail.
“In jail, all you do is wait,” Dhawale said. “When will it end? Nobody knows.”
His case file alone runs to 25,000 pages and lists more than 350 witnesses. A judge eventually granted him bail, ruling the delay violated his constitutional right to a speedy trial. Nearly a year later, his trial has yet to begin.
Structural problems continue to fuel the backlog. India’s court procedures, inherited from the British colonial era, rely heavily on lengthy oral arguments and handwritten witness testimony, all of which must be transcribed manually. Although the Supreme Court has announced plans to limit oral arguments to 15 minutes starting in 2026, experts warn the change will only work if lawyers cooperate.
Judge shortages are another major factor. India has about 15 judges per million people, compared to roughly 65 per million in Canada. Vacancies remain stubbornly high — about 40 per cent in high courts and 20 per cent in lower courts — often because appointments are delayed or never finalized.
Some offences that clog Indian courts would never reach a criminal courtroom elsewhere. Bouncing a cheque, for instance, is a criminal offence in India that can carry a jail sentence. In Canada, it typically results in a bank fee. At one point, nearly 1,000 cheque-bouncing cases were being filed every day in Delhi alone.
Bail applications have also surged, with some high courts receiving hundreds daily.
Reform efforts are emerging slowly. Patel has been experimenting with Adalat AI, a generative artificial intelligence system that transcribes court proceedings in real time and multiple languages. The tool, now used in thousands of courts across several states, eliminates the need for stenographers and dramatically speeds up hearings.
“Where have you been all my life?” Patel recalled thinking when he first saw it.
But for Goel, incremental reforms offer little comfort. He says justice for his mother has been “buried in bureaucracy,” despite his family’s resources and persistence.
“I’m trying my best,” he said. “But it’s exhausting.”
He also expressed disappointment that Canadian officials have largely disengaged, even though his mother lived and worked in Canada for decades and one suspect now lives in the Toronto area.
Most painful, he said, is watching his 88-year-old father wait year after year for closure.
“I made a promise,” Goel said, his voice breaking. “And I need to fulfil that promise — as best I can.”
