In Odisha’s High Court, judges are clearing more cases than are being filed. Yet the backlog refuses to shrink.
In 2024, the court disposed of more than 90,000 cases, a clearance rate of 101 per cent. That means its judges were working faster than new filings were coming in. And yet, the backlog barely moved. The year opened with 146,985 cases pending, and it closed with exactly the same number. The paradox is stark. The judges are not underperforming. The appointments system is.
The Department of Justice’s official figures as of 1 May 2026 lay bare the scale of the crisis. The Hon’ble High Court of Orissa drags along with only 19 on the Bench as against the sanctioned strength of 33. That’s a 42.4% vacancy rate. Nearly one in every 2.4 sanctioned seats is empty. Worse, all nine of the court’s additional-judge posts are vacant, not understaffed, but entirely unfilled. Odisha is running 13 points worse than the national average vacancy rate of 29 per cent.
This is not a temporary dip. Sanctioned strength was deliberately expanded from 27 to 33 in February 2022 to meet Odisha’s caseload. But instead of filling those seats, the working strength has slid from 21 judges in late 2024 to just 19 today. The last elevations, Justice Sibo Sankar Mishra from the Bar and Justice Ananda Chandra Behera from the subordinate judiciary, were sworn in on 5 September 2023. Since then, retirements have outpaced appointments.
A pipeline in collapse
The crisis is not confined to the High Court. The feeder pipeline from below is broken too. The January 2025 Higher Judicial Services exam, meant to fill 14 district judge vacancies, produced zero qualifiers out of 83 candidates. Odisha’s subordinate judiciary is already short by 201 officers, with 840 serving against a sanctioned strength of 1,041. The result is that over 19.3 lakh cases are pending in district courts as of January 2025.
This is a double choke point. Elevations from the Bar and Bench to the High Court have stalled. Promotions within the district judiciary have stalled. Both entry points into the system are blocked, feeding the same bottleneck.
The mechanical relationship between vacancies and backlog is easy to miss. Pendency is not being driven by a rising tide of new litigations but by unfilled sanctioned posts. If vacancies were simply filled, pendency would not just stabilise, it would fall every year and could be eliminated without expanding sanctioned strength at all.
In the case of Odisha, the 33 seats already exist on paper. The court does not need a bigger infrastructure but 14 empty rooms.
Odisha’s invisibility problem
As of 2026, Odisha is one of seven High Courts with zero representation on the Supreme Court of India. A state judiciary that has not sent a single judge to the apex court in the current cycle has no voice in how the Collegium thinks about regional balance when the next vacancies open up. Odisha’s invisibility problem is not confined to the state alone. It is structural, cascading from the top.
The ignorance is clearly visible in the case of fresh recommendations being sent to the Collegium. It is fairly recognised that some recommendations are approved fast, but some others are kept pending for months. One of the reasons attributable to such deferred notification is that there is no legally binding timeline for approval of recommendations. Consequently, the appointment of judges or elevation have been coming at a staggeringly varying pace.
It is quite disheartening to witness the institution proclaiming ‘law’ and governing ‘order’ is itself adrift, operating in a regulatory vacuum. Even the years of litigation around judicial appointments did nothing to move the needle.
The human cost of delay
Behind the numbers are litigants waiting years for resolution. By June 2024, 65,658 cases in the Orissa High Court had been pending for more than five years. That is nearly half the backlog. With fewer judges, bench specialisation erodes, interim relief becomes the default strategy, and jurisprudence in specialised areas like arbitration or tax halts.
At the trial courts level, the knock-on effect is brutal. A High Court that cannot elevate district judges stalls the subordinate court promotion pipeline, compounding the backlog. Odisha’s civil justice ranking feeds into India’s broader credibility metrics. The country sits at 114 out of 143 globally, with delays of this kind a major driver.
Odisha’s judges are outperforming their staffing, but the system is punishing them for it by not sending reinforcements. The 101% clearance rate but flat pendency paradox is the sharpest evidence yet that the problem is not judicial productivity but judicial appointments.
The Collegium’s delays, the Union government’s inertia, and the collapse of the feeder pipeline together create a structural bottleneck. Odisha is not unique, but it is extreme. And the statistics of 42.4% vacancy, zero additional judges, and zero Supreme Court representation make it the clearest case study for why reform is urgent. The Orissa High Court does not need more sanctioned posts. It does not need more committees or studies. It needs appointments. The 14 empty seats must be filled. The feeder pipeline must be repaired. The Collegium must move faster, and the centre must stop indefinitely sitting on recommendations.
The judges have shown they can deliver; 101% clearance is proof. The system must now deliver for them; the last fresh appointments came nearly three years ago, and the silence speaks louder than any statistic. If left unaddressed, the third pillar of democracy will crumble under a backlog that is not of their making.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
