Every few years, a new proposal emerges to “fix” India’s judicial system. Most fade into obscurity. But when the now Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, who was sworn in on 24 November, suggested in September that high court and Supreme Court judges should face performance evaluation, it felt different. This time, the call came from the highest echelons of the institution itself.
The judiciary makes for an easy punching bag. The mountain of pendency, colonial hangovers of addressing them as “My Lord”, the long summer vacations — these are ready ingredients for casual outrage. These are distractions. The pain of the litigant lies deeper — the unpredictable adjournments, the agonising slowness of progress and the complete opacity on how some cases are heard and others are left in limbo.
It is welcome that CJI Kant wants to address these issues. It signals a recognition from the upper judiciary that the system is failing. Reform born of frustration rarely ends well. The reflexive impulse that “something must be done” is understandable — the danger lies in doing it badly. Once entrenched, systems are difficult to reverse.
The proposal deserves to be taken seriously. The evaluation of judges is important. And because it matters, we cannot afford to get it wrong. Before we determine what to measure or how to measure it, we need to ask a deceptively simple question: why are we measuring at all?
Call for accountability not new
Evaluation systems typically serve one of three goals. The first is institutional diagnosis: using data to identify bottlenecks and understand where courts need more resources — more staff, better technology, workload reallocation. The second is individual development: structured feedback passed back to a judge as a tool for professional growth. The third is accountability: the report card, carrying consequences of promotion or transfer. The danger lies in confusing these goals.
We have an example of one such confused system. The Annual Confidential Report (ACR) for subordinate judges is a massive exercise in judicial evaluation. As Prashant Reddy and Chitrakshi Jain document in their book Tareekh Pe Justice, it is a chaotic mix of the quantitative and subjective.
Assam offers “units” for disposing of cases, with extra points for clearing old matters. Karnataka tracks disposal across twelve categories and monitors old cases in thirteen specific buckets. Calcutta measures judges’ hours. Bihar grades judgment writing from A+ to C. Worse, in states like Assam and Madhya Pradesh, the ACR explicitly grades “integrity,” with low scores triggering vigilance enquiries. This is precisely what the American Bar Association’s black-letter guidelines warn against: performance evaluation must never be used for judicial discipline. If a judge knows her scorecard can trigger a corruption probe, she loses the fearlessness required to rule against the powerful.
The ACR currently applies only to subordinate judges, not the high courts and the Supreme Court. If the CJI’s proposal intends to extend what already exists, this is the architecture it would scale.
The call for accountability is not new. This recent one comes amidst a series of events — Justice BV Nagarathna’s recorded dissent on a Supreme Court elevation, the corruption allegations against Justice Yashwant Varma, and judges becoming bolder about their political leanings. These are now public discourse. We have moved from former CJI TS Thakur declaring that we need more judges — he asked for 70,000 — to an era where Collegium decisions are public, and the current CJI is asserting that we need better judges. The upper judiciary seems painfully aware that trust in the system is eroding. The old ways are no longer tenable.
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Change is welcome
This openness to change is welcome, but we must be cautious. Mexico experimented with judicial elections and ended up concentrating power in the ruling party. Pakistan’s recent “reforms” — demoting the Supreme Court and creating an executive-picked Federal Constitutional Court — were sold as democratisation. They were a power grab. In this climate of populism, the clamour for accountability can easily transform into evaluation becoming a lever of control rather than a tool for feedback and improvement.
Hospitals, universities, banks, software firms – everyone struggles with balancing quality and quantity. The court would do well to heed some hard-earned wisdom from the private sector. Different goals require different tools: a system designed to decide promotions fails when repurposed for coaching. What gets measured gets managed – so knowing what to focus on matters. Goodhart’s law applies with particular force to complex work: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be useful. These are some absolute basics for anyone setting up a performance evaluation.
This may seem difficult, but it needs to be done. It is possible to get this right. The timing is right. The atmosphere is right. The Chief Justice wants to act. We must treat this seriously. The current ACR mechanism does not inspire confidence that we know how to do this well. We must debate what we measure, how we measure and who runs this performance evaluation system. These are genuinely complex questions. But first, we must be clear about why.
It cannot be to project an image of transparency or satisfy the collective conscience of society. It must be to fix a system that is deeply broken. Most importantly, we want accountability without compromising judicial independence. In all this discourse, the litigant is lost. The citizen waiting years for a verdict, the undertrial languishing in jail, the firm losing money with every delay and adjournment – they are the point. Processes and institutions must be designed with the litigant in mind. Yes, we need accountability. But first and foremost, we need a system that works for the people it is meant to serve.
Siddarth Raman is the co-founder and CTO of The Professeer. Gokul Sunoj is a researcher at XKDR Forum. Pramod Kabra runs an investment advisory firm.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)