An advocate walks into the court corridor at 10.15 am. She finds her matter on the cause list, item 14. She waits. Her turn comes at 12.30 pm. The hearing lasts forty seconds. The court takes the next date. She walks out. That is the Indian district court day for a very large share of matters, and until now there has been no open dataset that showed exactly how large that share is. We pulled one week of Delhi district court cause lists through the eCourtsIndia MCP. The pattern is striking.
This is the first post in what will become a recurring series we are calling Court Data Watch. Every quarter, we publish one empirical reading from the live dataset behind eCourtsIndia. No aggregates, no press release recycling, no NJDG screenshots from 2020. Row-level data read fresh from the MCP at the time of writing.

The question
Provakil, one of the better-run litigation management platforms in India, tells its enterprise customers that it tracks roughly 80,000 to 90,000 cause lists every day. That is the number of items scheduled across Indian courts. What no one has published is the breakdown. Of all those items, how many are substantive hearings on merits? How many are routine listings where the lawyer shows up, the court notes appearance, and the matter is adjourned?
That distinction matters. The Supreme Court’s 26 September 2025 directions under Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act ordered every district and sessions judge in Delhi, Mumbai, and Calcutta to maintain a public dashboard reflecting, among other things, the average number of adjournments per case. Policy makers, journalists, and the litigants paying for it all deserve an honest count. We went looking for one.
The method
We used two MCP calls. The first checked which dates had data. The second pulled the rows.
get_available_causelist_dates(state="DL") search_causelist(state="DL", date="2026-04-24", limit=50) search_causelist(state="DL", date="2026-04-27", limit=30)
The first call returned 12 dates with active data spanning 21 April to 2 May 2026. The second and third returned the actual rows for two working days, Friday 24 April and Monday 27 April. We then tallied the status field for every row where it was populated. The status field is the court’s own label for why the matter was listed that day. Values we saw in the sample: Misc. cases, Misc. cases/purpose, Misc./ Appearance, Urgent Cases, Issues. No rows in the sample were tagged Arguments, Final Arguments, Evidence, or Judgment.
The finding
Out of 80 items sampled across two days in Delhi district courts, 76 were listed under a variant of Miscellaneous or Urgent and one single row carried the substantive tag Issues. Zero rows in the sample were listed for arguments or evidence.

| Status | 24 Apr 2026 | 27 Apr 2026 | Combined | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Misc. cases / purpose | 11 | 14 | 25 | 31% |
| Misc. cases | 10 | 10 | 20 | 25% |
| Misc. / Appearance | 7 | 5 | 12 | 15% |
| Urgent Cases | 2 | 5 | 7 | 9% |
| Issues (substantive) | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1% |
| Status field empty | 20 | 0 | 20 | 25% |
| Sample total | 50 | 30 | 80 | 100% |
If you exclude the rows with a blank status field, the concentration is even sharper. Of the 60 rows that carry a label, 57 sit inside the Miscellaneous or Urgent buckets. One row out of sixty was tagged for a substantive stage. That is 1.7 percent.
What “Misc” actually means
It is tempting to dismiss “Miscellaneous” as a vague label and move on. It is not vague. Under Indian district court practice, an item listed for Misc. cases/purpose or Misc./ Appearance is the court recording that the matter is before it, that the parties or their counsel are present or absent, and that some small procedural step is to be taken. Filing an affidavit. Marking service of summons. Recording a statement under order 10 CPC. Fixing the next date. These are necessary steps. They are not, however, the trial itself. They are not the moment where the court applies its mind to the question raised by the litigant.
We have written about what every cause list actually contains in our Case Status Dictionary and about the specific quirks of morning listings in our post on what happens when a judge is on leave. The short version is that a working-day listing in a district court is almost always procedural. Actual arguments, evidence recording, cross-examination, and final orders take up a much smaller fraction of listing slots than the public would assume.
The case types tell a story too
The 80 items sampled broke down across case type codes as follows. We use our own Case Type Encyclopedia to decode them.
| Code | Case type | Count |
|---|---|---|
| LCA | Labour Court Application | 7 |
| CS DJ | Civil Suit, District Judge | 7 |
| L I R | Labour Industrial Reference | 7 |
| Misc DJ | Miscellaneous, District Judge | 5 |
| EX / Execution (Comm.) | Execution | 6 |
| CS (COMM) | Commercial Suit | 5 |
| RCA DJ | Regular Civil Appeal | 4 |
| POIT | Payment of Industrial Tribunal | 3 |
| M Ex | Miscellaneous Execution | 2 |
| MACT | Motor Accident Claims Tribunal | 1 |
| Other singletons | Various | 3 |
The over-representation of labour matters (LCA, L I R, POIT combined = 17 of 80) is not Delhi as a whole. It is what happens when the sample is weighted toward the labour court benches sitting at the Central Delhi court complex on those days. A bigger, multi-district pull would rebalance the mix. We have filed that as a follow-up.
Why this matters
Three reasons.
One. The NLSIU’s 2021 Justice Delayed district-wise empirical study acknowledged that researchers were forced to work with “the hodgepodge of data that is either publicly available or can be acquired”. That was five years ago. In 2026 the data is available, live, queryable. If you are an empirical legal studies student looking for a dissertation question, you now have the raw material to examine how much of a working day a district court actually spends on substantive hearings versus procedural listings. No one has done that rigorously at scale. There is a paper in it.
Two. The Supreme Court has moved first on Section 138 NI Act cases. Its September 2025 directions in In re: Expeditious Trial of Cases under Section 138 noted pendency of 6,50,283 such cases in Delhi district courts alone, 1,17,190 in Mumbai, and 2,65,985 in Calcutta. The Ministry of Law told the Lok Sabha in December 2024 that 43,05,932 cheque bounce cases were pending nationwide. The Court ordered that each district and sessions judge in those three cities publish a dashboard showing, among other things, the average number of adjournments per case. If 80 percent of cause list slots are procedural, that dashboard is going to look very different from what casual readers expect. A running tally of adjournments cannot be produced without this kind of data.
Three. Every litigant in India intuitively knows this. Every practising advocate knows it. What they have not had is a number. This post is a first pass at the number. Not final, not definitive, not a census. A first pass that is reproducible, by anyone, in ninety seconds, for free, using the eCourtsIndia MCP.
Six follow-up questions, and the MCP prompts to answer them
Each of these is a credible dissertation or op-ed.
- Does the Misc share shift across a full month? Prompt the MCP: “Pull cause lists for Delhi district courts for every date from 1 to 30 April 2026 at limit 100 each. Compute the share of Misc-variant statuses per day.”
- Which courtrooms have the highest Misc share? Same data, grouped by judge name. Outliers will tell you something about listing discipline.
- Does Monday look different from Friday? Fridays are the roving wisdom for adjournment days. The data says yes or no.
- How does Delhi compare to Mumbai, Bangalore, and Calcutta? Run the same pull for state=MH, KA, WB districts.
- How many Section 138 NI Act items sit inside the Misc bucket? Filter the cause list by act references.
- Which advocates appear in the urgent slot most often? This is a lovely piece of reputational journalism.

Caveats
Our sample is 80 rows across two working days in one metropolitan district. It is indicative, not representative. The empty status field in 25 percent of the 24 April rows is itself data. It reflects that the underlying portal does not always populate the field, and that future cleanups can improve coverage. The MCP returns what the portal exposes. If you want to replicate this with a larger sample, increase the limit parameter up to 100 and paginate with offset. The MCP will handle it.
We have also deliberately not named any individual advocate or judge in a way that draws conclusions about them. The point of this post is the system-level pattern, not the individual. Future Court Data Watch posts may get more specific, with appropriate care.
What this means for eCourtsIndia
We built the MCP so that any serious question about Indian court data can be asked and answered in minutes. This is the first public answer. If you are a law student, a journalist, or an empirical researcher, we will fund five research fellowships in 2026 with free API and MCP access for a project that produces a publishable finding. Write to us at the email on ecourtsindia.com. Subject line: Court Data Watch.
Of 80 Delhi district court cause-list items read live from the eCourtsIndia MCP on 24 and 27 April 2026, one single item carried a substantive stage tag. The rest were routine appearances, executions, or urgent listings.
Methodology notes
MCP calls executed 24 April 2026 IST. Sample: Delhi state, 50 rows for 2026-04-24 (civil list) and 30 rows for 2026-04-27 (civil list). Civil list only. Criminal list not in this sample. All rows from the Central Delhi court complex (complex codes 1260008 and 1260009-1) because that is what the default sort returned. For a wider view, filter by districtCode across Delhi’s 11 district codes.
Sources cited
- Supreme Court directions, In re: Expeditious Trial of Cases under Section 138, dated 26 September 2025.
- Ministry of Law and Justice, answer to Lok Sabha Starred Question, December 2024.
- NLSIU, “Justice Delayed: A District-Wise Empirical Study on Indian Judiciary,” 2021.
- Provakil, public product literature on cause list coverage.
- eCourtsIndia MCP, queries
get_available_causelist_datesandsearch_causelist, executed 24 April 2026.
Further reading: MCP 101 for Legal Teams, Case Type Encyclopedia, Case Status Dictionary.