Not every grievance belongs in a constitutional court
India’s constitutional courts are being asked to settle everyday administrative disputes. A tiered accountability model would let them do the work only they can do.
By Akshay Malhotra · October 2026
India’s Constitution guarantees remedies against the abuse of public power. Citizens increasingly experience those guarantees as available in theory and out of reach in practice.
Articles 32 and 226 empower the Supreme Court and the High Courts to issue writs that protect fundamental rights and ensure public authorities act lawfully. It is among the most powerful judicial review jurisdictions in any constitutional democracy. In practice it has also become the default forum for grievances that have little to do with constitutional interpretation: a delayed pension, an unexplained licence refusal, a missing disclosure rule. Government figures told to Parliament in February 2026 put pending cases across Indian courts at more than 4.7 crore, and a substantial share are administrative matters that reached a constitutional court only because no adequate alternative existed closer to the point of failure.
What a fuel-labelling case shows
I saw this directly in a public interest petition I filed under Article 32 on the sale of ethanol-blended petrol. The petition argued that most drivers did not know the petrol they were buying contained ethanol, that no rule required pumps to say so, and that this denied consumers an informed choice under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019. It asked the Court to direct labelling of ethanol content at every pump, enforcement of consumer protection law, and an impact study. The Supreme Court declined to entertain it and dismissed it on 1 September 2025.
At its core the dispute was about disclosure to consumers. What was missing was an intermediate mechanism that could examine it before it needed a court’s institutional weight, and no outcome in court changes that.
What India already has
There is a partial answer. Beginning with Madhya Pradesh in August 2010, 22 states and Union Territories have enacted right to services laws. They set statutory timelines for defined government services and let citizens escalate delays to an appellate authority, with penalties for officials who default. For the services they cover, such as certificates and ration cards, they have measurably reduced delay.
Their limits are scope and independence. They generally exclude regulatory and licensing decisions, which is the category disputes like this one fall into. And the appellate authority is typically an officer from within the same administration, which limits both its impartiality and its willingness to rule against the department that employs it.
What independence looks like elsewhere
Two comparative examples show what is missing. In the United Kingdom, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, alongside sector ombudsmen for financial services and energy, gives citizens a free, investigatory route to a binding or quasi-binding remedy without going to court. In Australia, the Administrative Review Tribunal, which replaced the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in October 2024, conducts merits review. It stands in the original decision-maker’s shoes instead of only checking legality, and it sits outside the ordinary court hierarchy.
Both share a feature India’s service guarantee laws lack: independence from the department whose decision is under review.
A three-tier model
I would extend India’s accountability architecture deliberately, in three tiers.
- Service guarantees, widened. Expand the existing statutory framework to cover regulatory and licensing decisions, not only front-line service delivery.
- An independent administrative tribunal or ombudsman. Create it by statute, with security of tenure and an appointments process insulated from the department concerned. It would conduct merits review and issue directions that bind unless appealed on a point of law.
- The constitutional courts. Reserve writ jurisdiction, outside urgent or rights-threatening cases, for genuine questions of legality, vires and fundamental rights, reached once the first two tiers are exhausted.
The objections
The main objection is constitutional. In the line of cases beginning with Madras Bar Association v. Union of India, courts have repeatedly struck down tribunal structures that left members’ tenure, salary or removal under executive control, because such bodies cannot be independent enough to stand in for a court. Any new tribunal would have to answer that directly, with an independent appointments commission and fixed, judicially enforceable terms of service, and not treat independence as a detail to be settled later.
The second objection is practical. States with uneven administrative capacity will not build effective independent tribunals at the same pace. That argues for central framework legislation that sets minimum standards, implemented through state-level institutions, and not for a single national body.
What it would change
Filtering ordinary administrative grievances away from the constitutional courts would not weaken judicial review. It would let that review do the work only courts can do, testing legality and protecting rights, while giving citizens a faster and more accessible route to the everyday remedies that prompted their claims in the first place.
Figures: pendency from the government’s reply to Parliament, February 2026; right to services laws counted as of 2025.