Divya Sornaraja has posted The Forum Problem: A Structural Map of India’s Judicial Ecosystem on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
India’s judicial-reform debate is organised around the queue: pendency counts, disposal rates, judge-to-population ratios. This paper argues that the queue is the second question. The first is whether the room exists—whether the forum a statute promises has been constituted, staffed, and given an unambiguous place in the appellate lattice. That is a question about state capacity, and it is one emerging markets share wherever legislated institutions outrun the administrative capacity to build them.
I introduce the Judiciary Entity Map (JEM), an open, source-linked structural dataset of India’s judicial and quasi-judicial ecosystem. Release v1.0.1 holds 1,145 entities and 1,800 relationships, and those entities are not courts. They are the whole administrative graph: the adjudicatory forums together with the appointers, funders, complaint-recipients, and office-holders that wire them, plus role archetypes and generic scaffolds held apart from the substantive counts. Any forum-level sub-count is an approximation, not a census. Every relationship is grounded, where possible, in constitutional text, statute, gazette notification, or official report, with explicit data-quality flags where it is not.
From the dataset I derive a four-part typology of carrying-capacity failure: forums delayed (GSTAT, eight years from statute to seated members), forums never built (the Arbitration Council of India, the Mediation Council of India, seven state and Union Territory Lokayuktas), forums hollowed (APTEL’s technical-member vacancy filled only after judicial prompting; the Allahabad High Court at roughly half strength), and forums ambiguous (Debts Recovery Tribunal appeals from Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam rerouted to an appellate tribunal some 1,500 kilometres away, generating writ litigation in two High Courts about where to litigate). Each mode redirects disputes rather than resolving them, and the redirection lands, predictably, on the constitutional courts.
The account has become newly concrete. In August 2026 Parliament passed the Tribunals Reforms Act, 2026 (Act 17 of 2026, in force from 25 August 2026), establishing a National Tribunals Commission and a National Tribunals Data Grid for sixteen central tribunals. It is an appointments reform, and it leaves three of the four failure modes, and the wider ecosystem, outside its reach. The paper’s finding is not the dataset but the absence the dataset fills: no official, public, current map of India’s judicial forums exists. JEM is offered as an imperfect, automation-built, community-reviewed starting point—an existence-proof that such a map can be built—and the recommendation follows from it. India needs an official, live dashboard of every judicial entity and its status, and a standing authority to institutionalise carrying capacity across the whole ecosystem, not sixteen tribunals alone.
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