On 1 September 2025, Delhi’s district courts had 6,50,283 pending Section 138 cheque bounce cases. Mumbai had 1,17,190. Calcutta had 2,65,985. Nationwide, the Ministry of Law told the Lok Sabha in December 2024 that 43,05,932 cheque bounce matters were pending across Indian courts. In September 2025, the Supreme Court of India issued comprehensive directions in In re: Expeditious Trial of Cases under Section 138, ordering, among many other things, that every District and Sessions Judge in Delhi, Mumbai, and Calcutta “maintain a dedicated dashboard reflecting the pendency and progress of cases under Section 138 of the NI Act”. This post is the technical blueprint for that dashboard.
Why this is a bank and NBFC problem, not just a judicial one
Section 138 proceedings are the last resort of a lender or vendor who has received a dishonoured cheque. The litigation is criminal in form but financial in substance. A bank can win every single one of these matters and still have no visibility on which ones were disposed last Thursday, which ones have a next hearing this Friday, and which ones a magistrate is about to hear arguments on. Every day this visibility gap stays open is a day of working capital locked.
What the MCP tells us about the indexed universe
A single search_cases query for “cheque bounce” on 24 April 2026 returned 3,566 indexed matters with full-text hits in the order body. Facets from that response tell the story.
| Facet | Top values |
|---|---|
| State | UP (1,227), Delhi (547), Maharashtra (309), Karnataka (222), Telangana (218) |
| Court | UPHC01 (1,214), DLHC01 (424), HBHC01 (210), SCIN01 (186) |
| Case status | Disposed (2,992), Pending (412), Dismissed (69), Allowed (47) |
| Filing year | 2018 spike (650), 2022 (377), 2023 (321), 2024 (214), 2025 (152) |
That UP lead is not an accident. The Allahabad High Court sees more cheque bounce revision and miscellaneous matters than any other High Court in the country. A lending product exposed to North Indian borrowers should weight its portfolio accordingly.
Building the dashboard
Four calls. Four widgets.
- Total exposure.
search_cases(query="cheque bounce", caseStatuses="PENDING", petitioners="Your Bank"). Paginate. Sum. - Aging buckets. Group by
filingYear. Anything 2020 or earlier goes in the red bucket. - Next 30 days of listings.
search_causelistfiltered to your CNR list and the next 30 dates. - New orders this week.
bulk_refresh_caseswith your CNR list and filter forlastHearingDatein last 7 days.
From dashboard to action
The SC’s September 2025 directions also ordered that courts offer payment facilities through secure QR codes or UPI links, and that summons expressly mention the respondent’s option to pay the cheque amount at the initial stage. A lender can pair that shift with an automated recovery notice pipeline. When the MCP flags a new summons issued, your collections engine sends the UPI link, the payment plan, and the human contact in one message. Most of these matters resolve without a second hearing when the accused is given the frictionless path.
Digital NI Act courts
Delhi High Court rolled out 34 Digital NI Act Courts in the 2024-25 cycle. The goal is to make the entire cheque bounce process paperless: digital summons, digital evidence, digital recording, digital disposal. Over the next three years the share of NI Act litigation that lives inside these digital courts will grow. Any lender on our API gets the same data feed whether the court is digital or physical. If and when more courts digitise, you inherit the upgrade for free.
Compliance angle
RBI master circulars on recovery practices and the Fair Practices Code both require that a lender keep an audit trail of the steps taken in recovery. A live API-fed dashboard is that audit trail. Export the JSON. Keep the log. Your compliance team has a better answer on day one than a spreadsheet ever gave them.
What this means for banks and NBFCs
You cannot track 43 lakh matters with a monthly email. You can track them with one daily API refresh. The Supreme Court has ordered the courts to publish dashboards. Build yours first. See our GC portfolio monitoring playbook for the CSV template and the weekly prompt. Our developer quickstart covers the code path for your engineering team.
A 43 lakh pending portfolio is not a backlog. It is a product requirement for the next decade of Indian credit.
Further reading: Case Status Dictionary, Case Type Encyclopedia.