The government must ease off on litigation to reduce the judiciary’s burden and help the economy

₹1 crore for high courts and ₹2 crore for the Supreme Court), pendency reduction has been marginal, reflecting a culture of litigation as bureaucratic insurance rather than legal necessity.This culture stems from several institutionalized incentives that make ‘default litigation’ the path of least resistance.Audit and vigilance frameworks indirectly treat unappealed losses as negligence; accounting codes of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) require every audit objection to be ‘settled’ or ‘explained,’ and an appeal offers safe harbour from being questioned, while a liberal appellate framework allows virtually automatic filing.Despite calls for a binding national litigation policy, successive governments have balked.Instead, we now have a ‘Directive for Efficient and Effective Management of Litigation’ (April 2025), which introduces nodal officers, legal cells and MIS dashboards, but lacks statutory teeth, performance-linked disincentives or real-time data integrity.LIMBS itself remains under-updated and fails to track reasons for appeal.Here is a five-point agenda for inclusion in a national litigation policy. First, India must move away from its open-ended appeal culture and adopt a ‘leave-to-litigate’ system that acts as a regulatory filter.

Departments should not be permitted to file more than one automatic appeal. Any second or higher appeal must obtain prior clearance from an empowered group of secretaries (EGoS) chaired by the attorney general that should apply a three-factor test of (a) public interest, or whether the case impacts governance or citizens beyond the immediate dispute; (b) legal novelty, or whether it raises a new or unsettled question of law; and (c) its probability of success, or whether an