Context:

• Recent announcements regarding new High Court complexes in Assam, Maharashtra, and Telangana present a timely opportunity to rethink judicial infrastructure in India.
• With mounting case pendency and evolving societal needs, the design and architecture of courts can play a crucial role in enhancing judicial efficiency, accessibility, and public trust in justice delivery.

Colonial Overhang - Architecture as Power:

• India's court architecture was conceived during British rule, deliberately designed to project state authority and institutional hierarchy.
• These structures were built for a vastly smaller judicial workload. For instance, the Supreme Court handled just 2,656 pending cases with 14 judges in 1960.
• Today, it confronts over 86,000 pending cases with only 34 sanctioned judges. The numbers at lower levels are even more sobering -
  • High Courts collectively carry 6.3 million pending cases.
  • District and subordinate courts are burdened with over 46 million pending cases.
• This explosive growth in caseload has forced ad hoc spatial expansion — what legal scholar Patrícia Branco aptly calls "judicial slumisation" — a built environment of overcrowded corridors, poor acoustics, and cramped courtrooms.
  • This undermines the very dignity of justice delivery.

How Poor Infrastructure Hurts Justice:

• The litigant's experience:
  • Overcrowded court premises make litigants and victims feel unwelcome and unheard.
  • Poor acoustics mean judges' queries are often missed, and parties must strain to make themselves heard.
  • This erodes public perception of justice — a foundational element of rule of law.
• The lawyer's dilemma:
  • Indian courts follow a docket system — cases are called in serial number order rather than at fixed time slots.
  • A lawyer with multiple hearings in different courts on the same day is structurally disadvantaged.
  • The resulting "clashes" cause frequent derailments in workflow, pushing cases back by days.
  • Junior lawyers are consequently trained, almost by default, to seek "pass-overs" or argue "in proxy" — practices that themselves contribute to delays.
• Access and inclusion:
  • Parking bottlenecks delay entry into court premises.
  • Infrastructure remains inaccessible for persons with disabilities.
  • Remarkably, HCs passing orders under the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 often lack the very crèches mandated under that legislation — a glaring institutional contradiction.

Global Best Practices - What India Can Learn:

• Several countries have used moments of national reconstruction or economic growth to deliberately redesign their justice infrastructure. For example,
  • United States: Devised formal design guidelines for courthouse construction post-New Deal (1930s).
  • Japan: With economic prosperity (1980s), rebuilt Tokyo District Court with structured planning norms.
  • South Africa: Constitutional Court designed around citizen-centrism and local values.
  • Australia: High Courts reflect community identity and inclusivity.
• India must similarly engage architectural experts to reimagine court complexes, moving beyond colonial spatial logic and centring design around all stakeholders — judges, lawyers, litigants, victims, and court staff.

Policy Gap - The NCMS Blind Spot:

• The National Case Management System (NCMS) 2024 acknowledged the need to improve court infrastructure in line with the needs of all stakeholders.
• It even constituted a sub-committee — the Court Development Planning System (Infrastructure & Budgeting) — to address this.
• However, this sub-committee focuses exclusively on model plans for district and taluka court complexes, leaving out:
  • Reconstruction guidelines for HCs.
  • Planning frameworks for integrated court complexes.
• This is a significant policy lacuna, especially as multiple states are now actively planning to rebuild their HCs.

Way Forward:

• Frame: National design guidelines for High Court and integrated court complexes, similar to the US and Japanese models.
• Expand: The NCMS sub-committee's mandate to include High Courts and appellate-level infrastructure.
• Engage: Multidisciplinary experts — architects, urban planners, legal scholars, and accessibility specialists — in courthouse design.
• Draw: Inspiration from citizen-centric models such as South Africa's Constitutional Court and Australia's Kununurra courthouse.
• Incorporate: Universal design principles ensuring access for persons with disabilities, nursing mothers, and elderly litigants.
• Explore: Integrated court complexes that reduce inter-court travel time for lawyers, thus minimising hearing clashes under the docket system.

Conclusion:

• The construction of new HCs is not merely an infrastructural exercise — it is a constitutional moment.
• A well-designed courthouse communicates (without speaking a single word) that justice is accessible, impartial, and humane.
• As the Indian courts carry the weight of over 52 million pending cases, they cannot afford to be designed only for the colonial past.
• Hence, the Centre must ensure that architecture serves justice and restore public faith in the judiciary—a cornerstone of a vibrant democracy.