Tribunals, Appeals and the Slow Hollowing Out of India's Ordinary Court System

The idea behind India's tribunal system was straightforward and, on its own terms, sensible. Ordinary courts, staffed by generalist judges and already burdened with enormous caseloads, were ill-suited to resolve highly technical disputes in areas like taxation, company law, telecommunications regulation, or environmental clearance, matters that benefited from adjudicators with specialised domain expertise and from a process designed to move faster than general civil litigation. Article 323A and 323B, inserted into the Constitution through the 42nd Amendment during the Emergency, provided the constitutional basis for this architecture, and over the following decades Parliament established a wide range of tribunals: the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal, the National Company Law Tribunal, the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal, and the National Green Tribunal among the more prominent. Four decades on, the honest assessment is that tribunals have delivered real benefits in some domains while simultaneously creating a new set of problems that ordinary courts did not previously have.

The vacancy crisis migrates downward

Perhaps the most persistent and least resolved difficulty is that tribunals have inherited, rather than escaped, the vacancy problem that afflicts the regular judiciary. The National Company Law Tribunal, central to the functioning of India's insolvency resolution framework since the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code came into force, has repeatedly operated with a substantial share of its member posts vacant, directly slowing down time-bound insolvency proceedings whose entire design rationale depended on speed. Appointments to tribunal member positions require search-cum-selection committees, ministry clearances and, in some cases, judicial vetting, a multi-stage process that has proven no faster, and at points considerably slower, than judicial appointments to the regular courts the tribunals were meant to relieve. A tribunal established explicitly to solve a speed problem that then develops its own vacancy-driven speed problem represents a fairly complete failure of institutional design.

Executive control over tribunal appointments

A second, more constitutionally fraught concern involves the degree of control the executive retains over tribunal composition and service conditions. Because tribunal members are typically appointed for fixed, renewable terms and often include a substantial proportion of bureaucrats alongside judicial members, questions have repeatedly arisen about whether tribunals possess sufficient independence from the very executive whose decisions, in tax and regulatory matters, they are frequently called upon to review. The Supreme Court has intervened on this question multiple times, most significantly in the Madras Bar Association litigation spanning more than a decade, repeatedly striking down government rules on tribunal member qualifications, tenure and removal for failing to preserve adequate independence, and repeatedly finding the government's revised rules still deficient on subsequent challenge. That the same underlying dispute has required several rounds of Supreme Court intervention over more than ten years suggests either a genuine difficulty in designing appropriate safeguards or a persistent executive reluctance to cede the degree of control the Court has demanded, and the pattern of repeated non-compliance leans toward the latter explanation.

Appeals defeating the purpose of specialisation

A further irony undermines the tribunal project from a different angle. Many tribunal statutes route appeals from tribunal decisions either to a specialised appellate tribunal and then to the Supreme Court directly, or, in several instances, back into the High Courts through writ jurisdiction invoked on procedural or constitutional grounds regardless of statutory bar clauses attempting to exclude such review. The result, in practice, is that a dispute can pass through a specialised tribunal only to be relitigated substantially in a High Court under Article 226, defeating much of the speed and finality that the tribunal was meant to provide in the first place. Telecom and competition law disputes have shown this pattern repeatedly, with matters cycling between tribunal and High Court for years before reaching anything resembling finality, a sequence considerably longer than a more streamlined single-track appellate structure might have achieved.

The case tribunals still make for themselves

None of this should obscure genuine successes. The Income Tax Appellate Tribunal, one of India's oldest, has built decades of specialised jurisprudence and generally functions with a reasonable degree of procedural discipline, and the insolvency framework under the NCLT, vacancies notwithstanding, has meaningfully changed corporate debt resolution behaviour in India compared to the earlier regime under the Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction, which was almost universally regarded as a failure. Specialised expertise genuinely does produce better-reasoned outcomes in technically dense areas of law, and abandoning the tribunal model altogether in favour of routing all such disputes back to generalist High Court judges would likely degrade decision quality even if it simplified the appellate structure. The argument for tribunals as a concept remains sound; the argument against their current implementation in India is considerably stronger.

What a genuine fix would require

A durable solution requires treating tribunal appointments with the same seriousness and independence expected of judicial appointments, including fixed timelines for filling vacancies enforced through mandamus rather than repeated litigation, member tenure and removal protections insulated from ministry discretion in line with what the Supreme Court has already directed, and a rationalised appellate structure that does not permit the same dispute to be substantially relitigated at multiple levels. Parliament has had over a decade of judicial guidance, through the Madras Bar Association line of cases, on precisely what such a framework would look like. That guidance remaining only partially implemented after this long is not evidence of an unsolved problem; it is evidence of a solved problem awaiting political will that has, so far, not materialised.