Bombay High Court Bench Audit: 675,469 Cases, 39% Pending

# Bombay High Court Bench Audit: 675,469 Cases, 39% Pending Judge My Lawyer analyzed 675,469 cases filed at Bombay High Court between November 1997 and April 2026. The court has disposed of 409,690 cases — a 60.7% disposal rate — while 265,778 cases remain pending. Average resolution for disposed matters stands at 427 days. More than half the pending backlog has been waiting over five years, and the court now adds between 35,000 and 39,000 new unresolved cases to its rolls every year. This is not a court in recovery. The numbers describe a court running a widening structural deficit. ---

The Court in Numbers

Bombay High Court is the principal constitutional court for the states of Maharashtra and Goa, with territorial benches at Aurangabad, Nagpur, and Panaji. It hears writ petitions, criminal appeals, civil appeals, constitutional challenges, habeas corpus applications, and a wide range of original and appellate matters. The court has approximately 75 authorized judge positions. A 60.7% disposal rate places Bombay High Court well below the 80% clearance threshold that the Supreme Court of India has repeatedly prescribed as a benchmark for high courts. The court is not disposing of the cases it receives as quickly as they arrive. In 2024 alone — the most recent full calendar year — 64,563 cases were filed and only 28,196 were disposed, generating a net addition of 36,367 new pending cases in twelve months. ---

How to Read High Court Judge Data

A structural quirk in how e-courts records Bombay High Court data must be understood before any bench-level analysis is meaningful. Each judge appears under multiple name formats in the dataset: an all-uppercase version representing their current pending docket, and a proper-case version representing cases disposed after their tenure or transfer. When a judge is transferred or elevated, the cases they were handling are reallocated in the system, and their resolved matters continue to be recorded under a proper-case name spelling. Meanwhile, the UPPERCASE version of the same judge shows a low disposal rate — not because they are slow, but because all their active, unresolved cases are still assigned under that name. In practical terms: **UPPERCASE entries show currently active judges with large pending loads**; **proper-case entries represent completed tenures**, where the record is essentially closed and disposal rates cluster at 99–100%. For example: - **Revati Mohite Dere** (proper-case): 11,436 cases, 99.3% disposal, 312-day average — a completed judicial record - **REVATI MOHITE DERE** (uppercase): 11,019 cases, 23.5% disposal, 174-day average — the same judge's live, pending docket This split is crucial. Any analysis that uses raw disposal rates to compare active and retired judges will produce misleading conclusions. The data analysis below respects this distinction throughout. ---

The Bench Scorecard: Completed Tenures

For judges whose records are fully or nearly fully closed, the data reveals wide variation in both throughput and outcomes. Among judges with completed or near-completed records, resolution times range from **Sadhana S. Jadhav's 289 days** — the fastest — to **K.K. Tated's 687 days**, the slowest by this measure. The 398-day difference between fastest and slowest represents more than thirteen months of additional wait time for litigants whose cases fall in the slower category. **Justice A.S. Oka** — since elevated to the Supreme Court of India — handled 7,482 cases at Bombay High Court with a 99.7% disposal rate and a 466-day average. His record at the High Court is fully closed. Of his 6,788 recorded outcomes, 2,926 favoured the petitioner and 3,641 favoured the respondent, producing a petitioner win rate of 44.6% — slightly below the court average. ---

Currently Active Benches: Pending Load by Judge

For judges currently serving, the data captures their live pending docket and the cases they have already disposed. The disposal rate figures for these judges are artificially depressed by their ongoing, unresolved matters. **Justice Gauri Godse** carries the largest single-judge pending load in the dataset: 12,026 cases unresolved across 13,435 total filings. Her disposed cases average 454 days — in range with the court norm — but the sheer volume of unresolved matters assigned to her bench represents one of the most concentrated backlogs in the dataset. **Shri. S.R. Agrawal** and **SHRI H.M. BHOSALE** show the most pronounced disproportion between filings and disposals: S.R. Agrawal has 7,230 pending against only 788 disposed; H.M. Bhosale has 7,290 pending against only 304 disposed. While naming-convention effects partially explain low disposal figures for active judges, the ratio here (304 disposed out of 7,594 total) is unusually stark even by active-bench standards. **SHARMILA U. DESHMUKH** shows the highest average resolution time among active judges at 881 days — more than two years and five months — for the cases she has disposed. Among judges already partly through their active tenure, **RAVINDRA V. GHUGE** (130 days), **N. J. JAMADAR** (144 days), **REVATI MOHITE DERE** (174 days), and **MILIND N. JADHAV** (174 days) are clearing their disposed matters fastest, suggesting efficient handling of the matters that reach a conclusion before them. ---

The Backlog: 265,778 Cases by Age

The age profile of Bombay High Court's pending docket is more troubling than the headline number suggests. The 5–10 year bucket is the single largest: 86,544 cases filed roughly between 2015 and 2020 remain unresolved. Combined with the 10–20 year bracket, a total of 114,446 cases — 43% of the entire backlog — have been pending for more than five years. The 48 cases older than twenty years are the institutional extreme: matters that were filed before 2006 and remain unresolved after more than two decades. ---

Filing vs. Disposal: The Structural Gap

The single most important story in the data is the relationship between annual filings and annual disposals. In 2013, the court was adding roughly 8,000 net new pending cases per year. By 2024, that figure had grown to 36,366 — nearly five times as fast. In 2025, provisional figures show 38,716 new pending cases added. The gap between filings (66,166) and disposals (27,450) in 2025 is 38,716 — larger than the entire annual filing volume of 2013. The COVID-19 year of 2020 imposed a forced pause: filings fell to 29,073, but disposals fell even harder to 12,367. The court did not use the reduced-filing window to clear backlog. Post-2020 recovery has been asymmetric: filings rebounded to 64,000–66,000 by 2024–2025, while disposals have stagnated between 27,000 and 32,000 — well below the 40,000–46,000 range achieved in 2013–2015. ---

Outcomes: The Near-Perfect Split

Across 335,530 cases with recorded outcomes, the court distributes results with remarkable symmetry: This near-parity is consequential: the state wins contested writ matters at Bombay High Court at roughly the same rate it loses them. ---

Outcomes by Bench: The 21-Point Spread

Among judges with complete records and at least 1,000 recorded outcomes, petitioner win rates range from 38.4% to 59.7% — a 21-percentage-point spread. **Justice Mridula Bhatkar** shows the highest petitioner win rate at 59.6% across 8,742 recorded outcomes — the state or institutional respondent lost 60% of the time a verdict was reached. **Justice Ranjit More** shows the lowest at 38.4% — respondents prevailed in 61.6% of contested matters. The 21-point gap between these extremes, each covering 8,000–10,000+ outcomes, is too large and too stable to dismiss as random variation. ---

The Lawyers: Who Files Most and Who Wins Most

The state government's legal representation dominates the respondent side of the docket. The Government Pleader (Writ Cell) and its variants appear as respondent lawyers in over 50,000 combined cases — the largest single institutional legal presence in the dataset by a factor of ten over the next-largest private practitioner. Their win rate as respondent is approximately 47.9%. When the state appears as petitioner, the Government Pleader achieves a 75.8% win rate across 5,498 cases — the most successful petitioner-side institution by win rate at volume. The entry "THROUGH JAIL" — petitions filed directly by prisoners — represents 7,024 cases with a 41.4% petitioner win rate. Roughly four in ten prisoners who file without retained counsel receive a favourable order. Among named private practitioners: **P H Potnis** leads on win rate: 84.1% across 1,770 cases as petitioner lawyer, at an average of 825 days. **PRASHANT BHAVAKE** combines a 75.4% win rate with a faster 360-day average across 2,998 cases. **Ashwini Bandiwadekar** (1,272 cases, 74.2% win rate, 263 days) is the fastest high-win-rate practitioner in the dataset. **Ashok M Saraogi**, the highest-volume named private practitioner at 4,119 cases, records the lowest win rate among major lawyers at 33.9%. ---

What the Data Means

Five observations follow from the aggregate picture at Bombay High Court. First, the court's 60.7% disposal rate is not a temporary shortfall — it is a structural condition. Filings have exceeded disposals every year since at least 2013, and the gap has widened consistently. In 2013 the annual deficit was ~7,700 cases; in 2024 it was ~36,400. Unless disposal capacity increases by roughly 30,000 cases per year — a near-doubling of current throughput — the pending backlog will double within the decade. Second, five judges — Gauri Godse, A.S. Gadkari, Revati Mohite Dere, N.J. Jamadar, and Ravindra V. Ghuge — collectively carry over 44,000 unresolved cases. That concentration means five of the court's roughly 75 benches account for approximately 17% of all pending matters. Targeted clearance initiatives on these five benches would have an outsized effect on aggregate backlog figures. Third, the 5–10 year backlog cohort of 86,544 cases is the most urgent. At a constitutional court, cases of this age include challenges to administrative orders whose facts have changed, bail applications whose petitioners have served de facto sentences before final hearing, and civil matters whose underlying disputes have been superseded. Age does not merely delay remedy — after five years, it increasingly undermines the relevance of the remedy itself. Fourth, the 21-percentage-point spread in petitioner win rates across major benches is large enough to be material for litigants. The pattern is likely driven primarily by case-type distribution across benches, but it warrants ongoing monitoring as bench compositions change — particularly because litigants cannot select their bench. Fifth, the post-COVID disposal stagnation is the dataset's most important unexplained finding. The court achieved 40,000–46,000 disposals per year in 2013–2015, fell to 12,000 in 2020, recovered to 28,000–32,000 in 2021–2025, but has not returned to its pre-2020 disposal levels despite filings now running 25% higher than pre-COVID. What changed in the court's capacity to dispose of matters — whether in staffing, procedural rules, electronic hearing adoption, or bench composition — is not visible in the case data. But the gap between what the court achieved in 2013–2015 and what it is achieving today defines the scale of the institutional challenge. ---

About the Data and Methodology

This article is based on case-level data published by the e-Courts platform and analyzed by Judge My Lawyer (JudgeMyLawyer.com), India's legal analytics platform. The dataset covers 675,469 cases filed at Bombay High Court, with filing dates ranging from November 6, 1997 to April 21, 2026. All analysis uses fields as recorded in the court's official digital case records: case status (DISPOSED/PENDING), filing date, outcome category, judge name, petitioner lawyer name, and respondent lawyer name. Judge names appear under multiple spelling variants in the dataset; the uppercase/proper-case distinction described in this article reflects an observed pattern in the data, not a guaranteed rule, and individual cases may deviate from it. Average resolution days are calculated only for disposed cases with positive case duration values. Annual filing figures show gaps in certain years (notably 2016) likely reflecting incomplete data ingestion for that period. The 2025 figures are provisional and may be updated as cases filed late in 2025 receive their disposal dates. Outcome categories reflect the formal recorded outcome; they do not capture interlocutory orders, remand decisions, or cases disposed for procedural reasons rather than on merits. --- *This article is a factual summary of publicly available court data. Nothing in this article constitutes legal advice or a comment on the merits of any individual case. All outcome patterns are descriptive and are derived from aggregate data; they cannot predict the outcome of any specific matter. Readers who require legal guidance should consult a qualified advocate. Judge My Lawyer does not represent any party in any case referenced in this analysis.*