Access to justice is a command addressed to the whole State — the judiciary included.
India's courts hold over 5.5 crore pending cases. The conventional response is to build more courtrooms and appoint more judges — treating pendency as a supply problem. But a vast share of this litigation is not born in a courtroom at all. It is manufactured at a government counter: a succession certificate that takes 4 to 24 months even when uncontested, a mutation entry that is never made, an inheritance paper that dies in a file.
When the executive fails to act, the failure does not disappear. It converts. A grievance becomes a legal notice; a legal notice becomes a writ or a partition suit; a suit becomes twenty years of appeals. And the citizen has no shortcut, because refusal has a remedy — appeal. Delay has none. No appeal lies against silence.
In Anita Kushwaha v. Pushap Sudan (2016), a Constitution Bench held access to justice to be a fundamental right — adjudication that is speedy, affordable and within reach. A citizen forced into two decades of litigation for an entitlement no one disputes is denied that right as surely as one denied a hearing. Article 39A is a command, not a slogan; it binds every organ of the State that stands between a citizen and their entitlement.
The judiciary has anchored pre-litigation reform before: e-Courts, run through the Supreme Court's e-Committee; NALSA and the Lok Adalats, court-anchored settlement at national scale; the Mediation Act framework, institutionalising resolution before trial. Each ring of reform has moved intervention earlier in the life of a dispute.
Sugama Nyaya is the next ring outward — not pre-trial, but pre-dispute. It asks the institution that bears the cost of executive failure to sponsor the cure, and continues a reform tradition the judiciary itself began.
Success is measurable, and we intend to be measured: median days from filing to decision; the share of applications decided within 21 days; the share of returned applications cured and granted on resubmission; and, over time, the downstream suits that were never filed because the certificate arrived. The work begins with succession and inheritance documentation in a single-district pilot — the narrowest wedge of the widest problem — and scales, entitlement by entitlement, toward every routine service a citizen should never have to sue for.