India did a very good thing when it created the Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT); better late than never, as it took many years for the government to act on a suggestion from the Law Commission. Sadly, the AFT, like other Indian courts, has become overwhelmed. This devastating and, if anything, understated article by Pragya Singh in The Wire tells the tale. Over 28,000 cases are pending at the AFT. Excerpt:
After all, the backlog of cases in the AFT has grown even as spending on this tribunal has increased every year. The budget and expenditure records (also retrieved by Nayak from Union Budget documents of various years) show that the tribunal’s annual expenditure rose from Rs 20.68 crore in 2012-2013 to Rs 48.22 crore in 2022-2023. In 2025-26, the budget estimate (BE) was over Rs 56 crore, slightly over the Rs 54 crore BE in 2023-2024.
This naturally raises questions about the capacity of the AFT to resolve cases, but there is yet another layer to this data. The parliament question answered in March 2021 included details of vacant positions in the AFT, which have a direct bearing on its capacity to function. At the time, 23 of the 34 sanctioned posts (nearly 70%) across AFT benches were vacant – coinciding with a sharp rise in pendency during the pandemic years (see image 4, above, on vacancies and image 5, above, on disposal).
This meant that several benches were functioning with one or no members, and some benches could not function at full strength. The period of highest vacancies was 2020-2021, when parliamentary data and RTI details both show lower disposal numbers, contributing to rising pendency. Cases not disposed in a particular year are rolled over to the next year, from 18,829 to almost 28,000 in four years.
What is more, when 23 of the tribunal’s posts were vacant, case disposals fell sharply – from 6,575 in 2019 to just 1,939 in 2020 – adding to the backlog that has grown by nearly 50%: from 18,829 cases in early 2021 to about 28,000 by September 2025.
The contrast is stark: even as the military is widely celebrated, thousands of soldiers and veterans are still waiting quietly for basic service and pension disputes to be resolved.
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