Inside India’s endless trials

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I didn’t even manage to pick out a pair of curtains for my new Mumbai apartment before I was threatened with eviction. Three weeks after moving in, a local judge ordered the 60-year-old apartment block be vacated immediately due a clash with the land owner. 

As a recent transplant from New Delhi, the notice was unnerving. Yet none of the other 160-odd families living in the five apartment towers seemed remotely fazed. The eviction order turned out to be part of a dispute that had begun around the time I was born — almost four decades ago. Residents expected that if this one was ignored the next one would take almost as long to arrive. 

Over the years, successive governments have tried to reduce India’s judicial backlog and speed up the country’s legal process. Recent moves include deploying artificial intelligence for judicial research and chatbots to help litigants check their case status. 

But the government itself is the largest litigant clogging up the system. In total, there are over 50mn pending cases — up 50 per cent over the past decade. The vast majority involve property disputes.

One of the reasons for this accumulation is human resources. India has around 16 judges per million people, compared to over 150 for the US. In 2016, the issue brought the country’s chief justice, TS Thakur, to tears during a speech as he requested that the government hire more judges to wade through the “avalanche” of backlog. 

Namita Wahi, an expert on land rights and disputes with the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, thinks that India has such a high caseload of land disputes because land is “the most important resource as well as most connected intrinsically to community identity, history and culture.”

In India, the world’s most populous country, nearly 60 per cent of people still depend on land for their livelihood via agriculture. It is the source for housing, livelihood, food, sustenance, water and forests.

Wahi classifies land disputes in three categories: People vs people (like the argument that involves my apartment block); people vs state, such as when the government tries to take someone’s land for a development project; and state plus people vs people. In this final category are cases in which the government works with corporate groups to take land, such as the proposed redevelopment of the Dharavi slum in Mumbai by the Adani Group. 

There is no central data on the classification and tenure of such land disputes. But in one recent example a Delhi court concluded a property dispute after 66 years. Both the original litigants were dead. Still, the lawyer for one of the warring parties cautioned that the conclusion was in fact not the end, as the ruling would be appealed.

Three years ago, after pondering a dispute for 16 years, the supreme court sent back a 60-year-old land case for fresh adjudication to a lower court, which had already taken over 30 years to give its judgment in 2006.

A 2021 study of Mumbai real estate found that more than a quarter of the projects under planning or construction and 43 per cent of all “built-up spaces” in the city were under some litigation. My apartment block was one of them.

The flat that I live in was built on the side of a small hill in the city that rolls west towards the Arabian Sea, on land borrowed from one of India’s top actresses in the 1960s, Meena Kumari. Known at the time as the ‘tragedy queen’, for the sad roles she picked, Kumari lived up to her name. Addicted to alcohol, she died in 1972 at the young age of 38.

Soon after her death, Kumari’s stepson sued the apartment trust for not paying an adequate amount for the lease.

“The process is the punishment”, goes a well known legal concept that captures the agony of seeking resolution for a land dispute in India. In my case, however, the dependable length of this process is proving to be reassuring. 

“Don’t worry,” a friend and fellow building resident messaged me as we discussed the court order. “The high court and supreme court are still left. It will take 50 more years.”

krishn.kaushik@ft.com