It takes an enormous amount of time for a civil dispute to be decided in India. Take the example of the Bombay High Court, where a suit filed in 1947 was finally settled out of court this year, after 79 years in litigation. While this may be an extraordinary time frame, many legal practitioners in Mumbai estimate that a suit filed at the Bombay High Court usually takes more than 20 years to decide.

There are many reasons for our slow-paced judicial system, but too much work for too few judges seems to be a big factor. According to the 2011 Census, the population of Maharashtra was 112 million, larger than that of any European country except Russia. The state of Maharashtra has 15 judges per million people, while the Bombay High Court has only 1.9 judges per million people. By contrast, there are about 157 judges per million people in New York state. According to the National Judicial Data Grid, there are currently 648,725 cases pending at the Bombay High Court, of which 9,454 are civil suits.…