History of Constitution Benches
Under Article 145(3) of the Constitution, matters ‘involving a substantial question of law as to the interpretation of the Constitution’ are required to be decided by a minimum of five judges. These benches of the Supreme Court, often involving five, seven or nine judges, are called Constitution Benches.
Over the course of India’s history, these Constitution Benches have settled key questions involving individual rights and separation of powers thereby fundamentally shaping India’s rule of law framework. Some key issues such as the immutable nature of the fundamental rights under the Indian Constitution (Kesavananda Bharti v State of Kerala), limitation on the imposition of President’s Rule (S.R. Bommai v Union of India), clarifications on the law on personal liberties (Maneka Gandhi v Union of India) and deciding how territorial boundaries of India’s states should be demarcated (In re: Berubari Union) have been decided by Constitution Benches.
In the recent past too, they have been the harbinger of progressive change. Some of these landmark cases involve the decriminalisation of homosexuality (Navtej Singh Johar v Union of India), the declaration of the right to privacy as a fundamental right (Justice (Retd.) K.S. Puttaswamy v Union of India) and the declaration of the ban on women of all ages from entering the Sabarimala temple as violative of their fundamental rights (Indian Young Lawyers Association v State of Kerala).
Previous research on Constitution Benches
While a significant amount of literature has been individually published about the jurisprudence these landmark cases helped create, empirical research on the functioning of these benches is few and far between. Recognising this lacuna, Nick Robinson and others conducted a study, a decade ago, examining all the constitution benches that had been set up since India’s independence until the end of 2009. The research studied voting patterns, the length of judgments, foreign citations and winning party among others. In the recent past, shorter pieces that examine the judgments delivered by these benches have also been published. There is also an ongoing project which studies the Supreme Court, which in its research also touches upon constitution benches. However, none of the above studies comprehensively examine all the cases pending before these benches or conduct an analysis of the associated aggregate statistics. This Constitution Bench Pendency Project is an attempt to plug this gap.
Pendency before the Constitution Bench
As a part of the process of consolidating the cases before it, the Supreme Court now regularly publishes statistics on the number of pending cases, including the number of pending constitution bench cases. These numbers are also bifurcated into the number of main and connected matters. The itemised list on the other hand, is available at the terminal cause list published on the website. Unfortunately however, during the course of our research we found that the list of cases on the terminal causelist fluctuated sporadically without any of the missing cases being heard in court. To ensure a fixity and authority in numbers, we filed an RTI application with the Supreme Court. The results in the present portal reflect the cases pending before the Supreme Court as on 17 November 2022. However, cases disposed of till 7 November, 2022 have been excluded from the dataset. A culmination of this exercise found that there are 45 main constitution bench matters pending before the Supreme Court. Since quite often, one case might dispose of multiple connected matters, a total of 612 cases are pending before these benches.
The JALDI Constitution Bench Tracker
The present tracker examines these cases and hopes to provide the user an in-depth understanding of each of these cases in an accessible form. For every case, the portal explainsthe timelines of events and orders, information on facts, questions of law, arguments, precedents and legislations under challenge. The further readings section hopes to act as a resource for those individuals looking to explore these cases in even more detail. The portal also charts the tagged matters and the pendencies. Since the research mentioned above has found that the number of these benches has consistently dwindled over time, we hope that this portal highlights the need for this particular aspect of the Supreme Court’s pendency to be addressed with gravity. We think that these cases require special emphasis since they involve critical questions of law that only the Supreme Court in its judgment and eminence can resolve.
A large team worked to turn the Constitution Bench Pendency Project (“Project”) into a reality. Prashant Reddy T. (former Lead, Justice, Access and Lowering Delays in India Initiative (JALDI) at Vidhi) and Nayantara Vohra (former Associate Fellow, JALDI) were part of the initial stages of this project including scoping the cases from the terminal list and collating the orders from the Supreme Court website.
Apoorva (Research Fellow) and Vaidehi Misra (Senior Resident Fellow), under the guidance of Deepika Kinhal (Team Lead and Senior Resident Fellow) led the project in conceptualising and designing the process for creating summaries of these cases.
Along with them, Aditya Ranjan and Shreya Tripathy (Research Fellows) and Reshma Sekhar (Senior Resident Fellow) helped review the cases that were summarised by the Kautilya Fellows. Vidhi’s Kautilya Society chapters in various law schools across the country are designed to work both independently as well as with Vidhi researchers on real-world research projects.
The following Kautilya Fellows were instrumental to the preparation of this project and the JALDI team would like to thank them for their immense contribution. They are: Abin Thomas Alex, Adhipatya Singh, Akanksha Yadav, Amrashaa Singh, Ankita Gupta, Anukriti Randev, Arjun Butani, Prajwal Venkatesh, Sanskruti Yagnik, Shivani Jaideep Karnik and Soumya Jain. Sanjeev Gumpenapalli, an intern at Vidhi Karnataka also assisted in the research.
Naxcent has helped design and execute our ideas into the format of the Portal. Finally, the JALDI team would like to thank ATECF and the Tree of Life Foundation for the support and grant under which this Project has been funded.
| Case | Link to Summary |
| Kantaru Rajeevaru v. Indian Young Lawyers Association | |
| Mineral Area Development Authority etc. v. M/S Steel Authority of India | |
| Property Owners Association v. State of Maharashtra | |
| State of Uttar Pradesh v. M/s. Lalta Prasad Vaish | |
| State of Uttar Pradesh v. Jai Bir Singh | |
| Aligarh Muslim University v. Naresh Agarwal | |
| Arjun Flour Mills v. State of Orissa | |
| N. Ravi v. Speaker, Legislative Assembly, Chennai | |
| Rojer Mathew v. South Indian Bank Limited | |
| The State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh | |
| Animal Welfare Board of India v. Union of India | |
| Anoop Baranwal v. Union of India, Ministry of Law and Justice Secretary | |
| Ashok Kumar Jain v. Union of India | |
| Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay v. Union of India | |
| Assam Public Works v. Union of India | |
| Bar Council of India v. Bonnie Foi Law College | |
| C.B.I. v. Dr. R.R. Kishore | |
| Central Board of Dawoodi Bohra Community v. State of Maharashtra | |
| Janhit Abhiyan v. Union of India | |
| Karmanya Singh Sareen v. Union of India | |
| Kaushal Kishore v. State of Uttar Pradesh | |
| M/s Shanti Fragrances v. Union of India | |
| Mukesh Kumar v. V. K. Singh | |
| Pyare Lal v. State of Haryana | |
| Shilpa Sailesh v. Varun Sreenivasan | |
| Sita Soren v. Union of India | |
| State of Andhra Pradesh v. B. Archana Reddy | |
| State of Punjab v. Sahil Mittal | |
| State of West Bengal v. Paschim Banga BK Samity | |
| Sukhpal Singh Khaira v. State of Punjab | |
| Suvarna Paka Jagga Rao v. Chebrolu Leela Prasad Rao | |
| Tej Prakash Pathak v. Rajasthan High Court | |
| Union of India v. Union Carbide Corporation | |
| Union of India v. Preeti Agarwal | |
| Vivek Narayan Sharma v. Union of India |
