The Bank Litigation Index: HDFC Files More Court Cases Than Any Other Lender in India

Last updated: 23 September 2026. All bank totals re-pulled from the eCourtsIndia index on this date with an exact-phrase name match; the April 2026 figures and the old “21 percent of pending cheque bounce cases” comparison have been replaced.

HDFC Bank is named in 20,35,163 court records in the eCourtsIndia index, more than any other lender in India and about double State Bank of India’s 10,05,874. Kotak Mahindra Bank follows at 5,06,108, ICICI Bank at 4,01,736, Axis Bank at 2,92,222, Punjab National Bank at 2,75,849, Bank of Baroda at 2,14,229 and Yes Bank at 1,79,858. Together the eight lenders appear in 49,11,039 records, and in most of them the bank is the one filing. This index re-pulls every number from the live data on 23 September 2026, breaks each bank down by case type, status and state, and explains why a private retail lender now carries a larger court footprint than the country’s largest public sector bank.

Key takeaways

• HDFC Bank leads with 20,35,163 records, 9,15,928 of them still pending. It is the petitioner in about 97.5% of its appearances.
• State Bank of India is second at 10,05,874 records, with a very different shape: civil suits and Debt Recovery Tribunal applications, not cheque bounce complaints, lead its docket.
• Private banks almost never get sued in volume. PSU lenders such as Punjab National Bank (24.7% respondent share) and Bank of Baroda (23.3%) attract far more counter-litigation.
• HDFC Bank’s fresh filings rose from 93,077 in 2018 to 3,31,337 in 2025, a full calendar year and the highest in the series.
• Every count is dated 23 September 2026 and reproducible on the free eCourtsIndia litigant search. Records are appearances in court files, not rupees recovered.

The headline league table

HDFC Bank files more court cases than any other lender in India. On 23 September 2026 it was named in 20,35,163 records across the Supreme Court, all 25 High Courts, the district and taluka courts, and the tribunals that eCourtsIndia indexes, including the Debt Recovery Tribunals and the NCLT. That is the highest count of any public or private bank we tested, and roughly twice State Bank of India’s total.

Rank	Bank	Court records	Pending	Disposed	Petitioner share	Respondent share	Live search
1	HDFC Bank	20,35,163	9,15,928	11,17,170	97.5%	2.5%	verify
2	State Bank of India	10,05,874	2,83,478	7,14,927	83.6%	16.4%	verify
3	Kotak Mahindra Bank	5,06,108	1,97,674	3,07,624	96.3%	3.7%	verify
4	ICICI Bank	4,01,736	57,936	3,41,296	88.7%	11.3%	verify
5	Axis Bank	2,92,222	1,08,386	1,82,586	89.3%	10.7%	verify
6	Punjab National Bank	2,75,849	89,239	1,82,172	75.3%	24.7%	verify
7	Bank of Baroda	2,14,229	79,895	1,31,417	76.7%	23.3%	verify
8	Yes Bank	1,79,858	1,15,259	64,061	95.4%	4.6%	verify

Two notes on method before the analysis. First, these are at least figures. The count matches the bank’s name as a phrase, so a record where the party is typed as “H.D.F.C.” or with a spelling error is not counted, and some records name a branch officer instead of the bank. Second, the numbers are not comparable with the April 2026 version of this index, which reported HDFC Bank at 15,60,124 using a looser all-words match on a smaller index. The index has grown to 32 crore+ case records since then, and most of the change in every row is ingest, not new litigation. The replication section at the end explains exactly how each figure was produced.

How banks end up in court at this scale

An Indian bank shows up in court for one of four reasons. A borrower’s cheque has bounced and the bank files a complaint under Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881. The bank is enforcing a security interest under the SARFAESI Act, 2002, usually by asking the magistrate to help it take possession. The bank is recovering a debt before a Debt Recovery Tribunal under the Recovery of Debts and Bankruptcy Act, 1993. Or a customer, borrower or counterparty has taken the bank to court. The first three put the bank in the petitioner column. The fourth puts it in the respondent column.

HDFC Bank’s case-type facet makes the proportions visible. Of its 20,35,163 records, 12,09,762 are Criminal Complaint (CC) cases, almost all Section 138 cheque bounce complaints filed before metropolitan and judicial magistrates. Another 1,90,133 are Company Petitions (COP), a code some courts use for SARFAESI and company-law applications. 1,18,128 carry the CA code, 80,928 are civil suits, 80,521 are execution applications, 53,315 are arbitration matters and 30,641 are original applications before a Debt Recovery Tribunal. That is a retail lending machine written out as court filings. The listed types are the largest slices and do not add up to the full total.

Case type (code)	HDFC Bank records	What it usually is
Criminal Complaint (CC)	12,09,762	Section 138 NI Act cheque bounce complaints
Company Petition (COP)	1,90,133	SARFAESI and company-law applications, depending on the court
CA	1,18,128	Court-specific code; appeals and applications vary by state
Civil Suit (CS)	80,928	Money recovery suits
Execution Application (EA)	80,521	Enforcing a decree or award
Arbitration (Arb)	53,315	Arbitration petitions and award enforcement
OA before DRT (OA_DRT)	30,641	Debt Recovery Tribunal original applications

HDFC Bank: filings more than tripled in seven years

HDFC Bank’s records filed in 2018 number 93,077. For 2025, a complete calendar year, the figure is 3,31,337. That is about 3.6 times the 2018 level. The path was not smooth. 2020 fell to 62,753 because magistrate courts were largely shut during the pandemic. 2021 recovered to 1,38,554. 2022 stepped up to 2,28,908, which lines up with the end of the RBI’s loan moratorium and the post-pandemic recognition of stressed retail loans. 2023 held flat, 2024 rose to 3,07,860 and 2025 set a new high. By 23 September 2026 the index already held 1,51,265 HDFC Bank records filed in 2026, a partial year that will keep rising as fresh filings are indexed.

Filing year	HDFC Bank records	Change on previous year
2017	98,887	n/a
2018	93,077	-6%
2019	1,06,483	+14%
2020	62,753	-41%
2021	1,38,554	+121%
2022	2,28,908	+65%
2023	2,28,884	flat
2024	3,07,860	+35%
2025	3,31,337	+8%
2026 (to 23 Sep)	1,51,265	partial year

Anyone can drill into the docket on the litigant page. The slugged HDFC Bank page is at /litigant/hdfc-bank, with the historical name variants at /litigant/hdfc-bank-ltd and /litigant/hdfc-bank-limited. Add a case-type filter to see one slice, for example ?ct=CC for cheque bounce complaints or ?ct=COP for company petitions.

A representative HDFC Bank case verified for this index is CNR TSRA030057622021, a Section 138 complaint at an Additional Magistrate court in Rangareddy district, Telangana, filed by the bank’s credit card division against an individual borrower and disposed. It is one line in a docket of more than twenty lakh records.

State Bank of India: smaller number, different shape

State Bank of India’s 10,05,874 records make it the second-largest litigant among Indian banks. The mix is different. SBI’s top case types are Civil Suit (CS) at 2,94,053, Original Suit (OS) at 1,33,687, Criminal Complaint (CC) at 99,355 and original applications before the Debt Recovery Tribunals at 79,142. The bank relies on civil recovery and the DRT far more than HDFC Bank does, partly because its borrower base leans towards MSME and agricultural lending, where SARFAESI enforcement is harder and a civil suit is still the default route for smaller loans.

The geography tells the second story. SBI’s heaviest concentration is Maharashtra at 1,19,963 records, followed closely by Punjab at 1,15,898, then Tamil Nadu (78,676), West Bengal (70,927), Haryana (70,128) and Gujarat (69,058). Punjab’s near-top position is out of proportion to its population, and it matches the density of SBI’s rural branch network and farm-credit book in the state. You can check the state split yourself with a state filter on the litigant page, for example SBI in Punjab.

SBI is the petitioner in 83.6% of its appearances, well below HDFC Bank’s 97.5%. Its larger-ticket corporate book attracts counter-litigation. A borrower facing a SARFAESI notice files a writ petition or a securitisation application, and those land in the respondent column. SBI is a respondent in 1,65,161 records. A representative SBI case verified for this index is CNR PHHC010531362004, a Regular First Appeal at the Punjab and Haryana High Court, since disposed.

The PSU versus private gap, in numbers

Across the eight banks the gradient between filing and being sued is steep.

Bank	Sector	Petitioner share	Respondent share	Records filed for every one where the bank is sued
HDFC Bank	Private	97.5%	2.5%	39
Kotak Mahindra Bank	Private	96.3%	3.7%	26
Yes Bank	Private	95.4%	4.6%	21
Axis Bank	Private	89.3%	10.7%	8
ICICI Bank	Private	88.7%	11.3%	8
State Bank of India	PSU	83.6%	16.4%	5
Bank of Baroda	PSU	76.7%	23.3%	3
Punjab National Bank	PSU	75.3%	24.7%	3

HDFC Bank files about 39 matters for every one in which it is sued. Punjab National Bank and Bank of Baroda file about three. That is an order-of-magnitude gap, and it is structural. Private-sector retail lending is small-ticket and score-driven, and it is enforced through Section 138 complaints and SARFAESI possession applications where the borrower rarely has the means or the grounds to counter-sue. PSU lending mixes small tickets with large corporate exposure, and the large exposure produces the SARFAESI challenges, NCLT contests and writ petitions that put the bank on the defending side.

Yes Bank: a small balance sheet, a pending-heavy docket

Yes Bank’s 1,79,858 records are the smallest total in the top eight, but the profile is striking. It is the petitioner in 95.4% of its appearances and a respondent in only 8,344 records, the fewest of any bank here in absolute terms. It is also the only bank on the list with more pending matters (1,15,259) than disposed (64,061). 1,26,968 of its records are CC cases, so a young, fast-growing cheque bounce docket is the likely reason. The live search is at litigant?lit=yes+bank, with slugged pages at /litigant/yes-bank and /litigant/yes-bank-limited.

A sample case is CNR TNMD070224892025, a SARFAESI Section 14 application before the Chief Judicial Magistrate at Madurai, allowed in the bank’s favour and disposed in April 2026 within months of filing. That speed is what the SARFAESI route is designed to deliver, compared with the civil-suit pathway.

Kotak Mahindra Bank: a near-pure petitioner

Kotak’s 5,06,108 records put it third, and its filer profile is almost as clean as HDFC Bank’s. The bank is the petitioner in 96.3% of its appearances and a respondent in only 18,653 records. Its docket is led by 2,00,499 CC cases and 1,10,469 civil suits, with 24,552 arbitration matters. That is a retail and small-business book collected through cheque bounce complaints, recovery suits and arbitration, with very little large-ticket counter-litigation. The live search is at litigant?lit=kotak+mahindra+bank.

ICICI Bank and Axis Bank: the mid-pack

ICICI Bank (4,01,736 records) and Axis Bank (2,92,222) sit in the middle of the table with petitioner shares of 88.7% and 89.3%, closer to the private pattern than the PSU one. Both dockets are led by CC cases (1,59,343 for ICICI, 95,846 for Axis) followed by civil suits. ICICI stands out for its disposal rate: only 57,936 of its records are pending, the lowest pending share in the table, which suggests an older docket that has largely worked through the courts. Both banks have slugged pages, ICICI Bank and Axis Bank.

The PSU half of the table

Punjab National Bank (2,75,849 records) and Bank of Baroda (2,14,229) are the two public sector banks on the list after SBI. Their petitioner shares are 75.3% and 76.7%. Both lead with civil suits (57,443 for PNB, 50,092 for BoB) and carry large DRT dockets (38,655 and 33,495 original applications). The merger histories matter: PNB absorbed Oriental Bank of Commerce and United Bank of India in 2020, and Bank of Baroda absorbed Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank in 2019, so both carry legacy litigation filed in the names of the merged banks, some of which is not captured by a search on the parent name alone.

For the wider public sector picture, including other public sector companies and regulators, see our PSU Litigation Index. Live searches for the two banks: Punjab National Bank and Bank of Baroda.

Section 138: how big a slice is one bank?

The cheque bounce docket drives most of this table, so it is worth sizing it properly. On 23 September 2026 a full-text search of the eCourtsIndia index for records that mention both “Negotiable Instruments” and 138 returned 1,34,61,226 records, of which 53,33,191 were pending. HDFC Bank is a party in 5,84,368 of those records and 2,09,079 of the pending ones. That makes HDFC Bank a party to about 3.9% of the pending Section 138 records we can identify, the largest single-lender share, but nowhere near the one-fifth figure an earlier version of this post gave. That older figure compared all of HDFC Bank’s CC records, pending and disposed, with a pending-only national number, which is not a like-for-like comparison.

There is one more caveat. HDFC Bank has 12,09,762 CC records but only 5,84,368 records that mention the Act by name, because many magistrate-court records carry no searchable act text. The true Section 138 slice is therefore somewhere between those two numbers. Our full breakdown of the national docket, with state and court splits and a reconciliation of the different ways to count it, is in Cheque Bounce in India: Inside the Section 138 Litigation Crisis.

In September 2025 the Supreme Court, in Sanjabij Tari v. Kishore S. Borcar (decided 25 September 2025), issued directions to speed up these trials: summons served directly by the complainant and by electronic means, a standard synopsis format for every complaint, online payment links or QR codes so an accused can pay the cheque amount at the first stage, revised graded costs for compounding, and dedicated Section 138 dashboards in the district courts of Delhi, Mumbai and Calcutta. A lender with lakhs of these matters now has every reason to run its own dashboard alongside the court’s.

From a DIY dashboard to tracking that runs itself

We first laid out the dashboard pattern in Cheque Bounce at Scale: a handful of facet calls for total pending exposure, ageing by filing year, next-30-day listings from the cause-list search, and fresh orders through the bulk refresh endpoint. That build still works, and the eCourtsIndia API gives Rs 200 of free credits to start. Most legal and collections teams no longer need to build it from scratch.

eCourtsIndia’s AI Clerk now tracks cases for Rs 5 per case per month, with WhatsApp and email alerts at Rs 0.50 each when a matter is listed or an order is uploaded, and Rs 2 AI order summaries. Search, cause lists and directories stay free. For counterparty checks before a loan or a vendor contract, the LegalCheck API returns a person’s or company’s court record in one call, and our guide to background checks against Indian court records explains the manual route. Plan details are on the pricing page.

SARFAESI, DRT and NCLT: the second axis

Beyond Section 138, bank litigation runs through the SARFAESI Act and the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. SARFAESI Section 14 applications go to the Chief Judicial Magistrate or Chief Metropolitan Magistrate. Section 17 securitisation applications go to the Debt Recovery Tribunal, and appeals go to the Debt Recovery Appellate Tribunal. Writ petitions against SARFAESI action go to the High Courts. Petitions against corporate borrowers go to the NCLT, and eCourtsIndia indexes its 15 bench locations.

Because eCourtsIndia now indexes 18 tribunal and commission types alongside the regular courts, these layers appear in each bank’s facets. SBI has 79,142 DRT original applications, PNB 38,655 and Bank of Baroda 33,495. At the NCLT, SBI appears in 6,266 records across all benches and HDFC Bank in 1,147. Our NCLT Scorecard breaks that tribunal down bench by bench, and the NCLT and NCLAT case status guide shows how to open any insolvency matter.

For a corporate counsel reading a bank’s litigation infrastructure, the ratio of CC matters to civil suits is the quickest signal. HDFC Bank has about fifteen CC records for every civil suit. SBI has about one CC record for every three civil suits. ICICI and Kotak sit in between. The case-type mix tells you which recovery strategy the bank’s collections function is built around.

What the data does not say

These counts are appearances in court records. They are not recovery rupees. A Section 138 case can be for Rs 25,000 or Rs 25 lakh. A SARFAESI application can recover the whole loan or fail. A bank with twenty lakh records is not necessarily recovering more than a bank with two lakh. The count measures process volume, not outcome value.

Nor is it a measure of credit risk. A bank that files more cases may simply run a more granular retail book, or pursue defaults later in the cycle. The RBI’s supervisory data and the banks’ own disclosures are the right frame for asset quality. Court volume is the right frame for litigation workload. The index also leaves out private arbitration awards that never reach a court for enforcement, settlements that pre-empt litigation, and one-time settlements negotiated outside court.

Why this matters to a journalist, a regulator and a bank board

For a journalist, the league table is a repeatable scorecard. Re-running the same searches each quarter gives a bank-by-bank change. HDFC Bank’s rise from 3,07,860 records filed in 2024 to 3,31,337 in 2025, an increase of about 8 percent, is the kind of number a banking correspondent can report, with the caveat that indexing of recent years is still catching up.

For a regulator, the case-type mix is a conduct and operations indicator. A bank with most of its court volume in cheque bounce complaints has a different operational profile from one dominated by writ petitions and consumer complaints. For a bank board, the two numbers that matter are the petitioner share and the filing trend. A falling petitioner share means the bank is being sued more. A rising filing trend in a stable economy points to either earlier enforcement or a weakening book. Both deserve a question at the audit committee, which now has a public benchmark to compare against.

Replication and methodology

Every total in this index comes from three calls per bank to the eCourtsIndia MCP server or API, all run on 23 September 2026: search_cases(litigants="<bank name>", nameMatchMode="phrase", facets="caseStatus,caseType,stateCode"), and the same call with petitioners= and then respondents= in place of litigants=. The pending, disposed, case-type and state figures come from the facets in the same responses, and the filing-year trend from the filingYear facet.

One technical point matters for anyone rebuilding this. When a search is run with facet counting switched off, the total reported for a very large name can saturate at about one lakh, which is why a quick results-only query suggests that every big bank has “about 1,00,000” cases. With facets requested, the totals are exact counts of matching records. Every figure here was read from a facet-enabled response. Petitioner and respondent appearances add up to slightly more than the litigant total because a few records name the bank on both sides, typically intra-bank or branch disputes.

The three sample CNRs (TSRA030057622021, PHHC010531362004 and TNMD070224892025) can be opened on the main site. The free Litigant Search Guide explains name variants and filters, the Case Type Encyclopedia decodes the case-type codes, and the GC portfolio monitoring playbook turns these queries into a weekly board view. For the engineering path, see the developer quickstart and From Scrape to SLA.

Verification links

• HDFC Bank: https://ecourtsindia.com/litigant?lit=hdfc+bank
• State Bank of India: https://ecourtsindia.com/litigant?lit=state+bank+of+india
• Kotak Mahindra Bank: https://ecourtsindia.com/litigant?lit=kotak+mahindra+bank
• ICICI Bank: https://ecourtsindia.com/litigant?lit=icici+bank
• Axis Bank: https://ecourtsindia.com/litigant?lit=axis+bank
• Punjab National Bank: https://ecourtsindia.com/litigant?lit=punjab+national+bank
• Bank of Baroda: https://ecourtsindia.com/litigant?lit=bank+of+baroda
• Yes Bank: https://ecourtsindia.com/litigant?lit=yes+bank
• HDFC Bank, cheque bounce (CC) slice: https://ecourtsindia.com/litigant/hdfc-bank?ct=CC
• SBI, Punjab only: https://ecourtsindia.com/litigant/state-bank-of-india?sc=PB
• Section 138 NI Act, country-wide search: https://ecourtsindia.com/search?q=NI+Act+138
• SARFAESI Act search: https://ecourtsindia.com/search?q=SARFAESI

HDFC Bank’s collections function has become a litigation function: in 2025 alone it was party to more than three lakh freshly filed court matters.

Companion pieces in this data series

The same method applied to other slices of the index produced our companion analyses: 498A by the Numbers, which reads more than 18 lakh indexed records that mention Section 498A, The Conglomerate Litigation Map for the Adani, Reliance, Tata and Aditya Birla groups, the PSU Litigation Index, and The NCLT Scorecard.

Frequently Asked Questions