HDFC Bank is named in 15,60,124 court matters across the eCourtsIndia database. State Bank of India is named in 7,35,305. Kotak Mahindra Bank is named in 3,45,995. ICICI Bank in 2,60,550. Axis Bank in 2,04,588. Punjab National Bank in 1,77,274. Bank of Baroda in 1,44,103. Yes Bank in 1,26,627. Add the eight together and you get 35,54,566 court records, almost all of them with the bank as petitioner. This post pulls the actual numbers from the eCourtsIndia litigant search, breaks them down by case type, state, and court, and explains why HDFC Bank has more open court matters than the country’s largest public sector bank by a factor of two.
The headline league table
| Rank | Bank | Total court records | Petitioner share | Respondent share | Live verification URL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | HDFC Bank | 15,60,124 | 98.0% | 2.0% | litigant?lit=hdfc+bank |
| 2 | State Bank of India | 7,35,305 | 84.6% | 15.0% | litigant?lit=state+bank+of+india |
| 3 | Kotak Mahindra Bank | 3,45,995 | 99.9% | 3.6% | litigant?lit=kotak+mahindra+bank |
| 4 | ICICI Bank | 2,60,550 | 89.4% | 10.6% | litigant?lit=icici+bank |
| 5 | Axis Bank | 2,04,588 | 91.4% | 8.6% | litigant?lit=axis+bank |
| 6 | Punjab National Bank | 1,77,274 | 77.2% | 22.8% | litigant?lit=punjab+national+bank |
| 7 | Bank of Baroda | 1,44,103 | 76.7% | 23.3% | litigant?lit=bank+of+baroda |
| 8 | Yes Bank | 1,26,627 | 95.5% | 4.4% | litigant?lit=yes+bank |
Every figure in this table comes from a search_cases(litigants="<bank name>", pageSize=1) call against the eCourtsIndia API on 25 April 2026, plus the matching petitioners-only and respondents-only calls. The verification URLs in the rightmost column are public search pages on ecourtsindia.com that return the same totals to any reader who clicks through. The petitioner-plus-respondent sums are within one percent of the litigants total in every row, which is the sanity check for these numbers.
How banks end up in court 35 lakh times
An Indian bank shows up in court for one of four reasons: a borrower has bounced a cheque (Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881), the bank is enforcing a security interest under the SARFAESI Act, 2002, the bank is recovering a debt before a Debt Recovery Tribunal under the RDDB Act, 1993, or the bank has been hauled before a court by a customer or counterparty. The first three are the bank as petitioner. The fourth is the bank as respondent.
For HDFC Bank the case-type breakdown makes the proportions visible. Of its 15,60,124 court records, 9,15,958 are Criminal Complaint Cases (CC), almost entirely Section 138 cheque bounce complaints filed in the metropolitan and judicial magistrate courts. Another 1,67,927 are Company Petitions, which include SARFAESI applications under Section 14 and the bank’s NCLT filings under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016. 1,06,522 are Civil Appeals, mostly DRAT-to-HC challenges. 68,527 are Execution Applications, the post-decree enforcement step. 54,580 are ordinary Civil Suits, and 49,082 are Arbitration matters. That is the architecture of a modern private-sector retail lending operation rendered as court filings.
HDFC Bank: a 5x rise in seven years
HDFC Bank filed 60,707 fresh matters in 2018. In 2025, the same metric is 3,01,670. The bank’s annual court-filing volume has grown about 5x in seven years. The trajectory is not a straight line. The COVID year (2020) dipped to 45,793 because the magistrate courts were largely shut. 2021 partially recovered. 2022 was a step-change to 1,76,627, which lines up with the end of the RBI’s loan moratorium and the surge in post-pandemic NPA recognition. 2023 held at 1,90,765. 2024 jumped 43 percent to 2,72,408. 2025 is on pace for 3,01,670 by the same calendar measure.
| Year | HDFC Bank fresh court filings | YoY change |
|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 60,707 | — |
| 2019 | 76,963 | +27% |
| 2020 | 45,793 | -40% |
| 2021 | 98,314 | +115% |
| 2022 | 1,76,627 | +80% |
| 2023 | 1,90,765 | +8% |
| 2024 | 2,72,408 | +43% |
| 2025 | 3,01,670 | +11% |
A reader can drill into HDFC’s docket by case type at litigant?lit=hdfc+bank&ct=CC for the cheque bounce slice, litigant?lit=hdfc+bank&ct=COP for the company petition slice, and litigant?lit=hdfc+bank&ct=Arb for arbitration. The slugged litigant page that aggregates HDFC Bank entity filings is at /litigant/hdfc-bank, with parallel slugs for the historical name variants /litigant/hdfc-bank-ltd and /litigant/hdfc-bank-limited.
A representative HDFC Bank case verified for this post is CNR TSRA030057622021, a Section 138 NI Act criminal complaint at the Additional Magistrate Court in Rangareddy district, Telangana, filed by HDFC Bank’s Credit Card Division against an individual borrower and disposed in the bank’s favour. It is one entry in a docket of nearly a million such matters.
State Bank of India: smaller number, different shape
State Bank of India’s 7,35,305 court records is the second-largest count in the country. The case mix is different. SBI’s top three case types are Civil Suit (CS) at 2,58,897, Original Suit (OS) at 85,532, and Criminal Complaint (CC) at 81,544. The bank uses traditional civil suit recovery far more than HDFC does, partly because its borrower base is more weighted to MSMEs and agricultural lending where SARFAESI access is procedurally messier and a civil suit before a District Court remains the default route.
The geographic spread is the second story. SBI’s heaviest concentration is Punjab at 95,877 matters, then Maharashtra at 91,799, then Haryana at 64,127, Gujarat at 54,970, and West Bengal at 54,238. The Punjab share is unusual relative to the bank’s overall geographic footprint. Punjab’s farm-credit concentration, the seasonal cash-flow stress on smallholders, and the historical density of SBI’s rural branch network all show up in the docket. Anyone can verify the state-level distribution by appending &st=PB to the litigant URL: litigant?lit=state+bank+of+india&st=PB.
SBI is petitioner in 84.6 percent of its court appearances. This is materially lower than HDFC’s 98.0 percent, ICICI’s 89.4 percent, or Yes Bank’s 95.5 percent. The reason is that SBI’s larger-ticket lending portfolio attracts more counter-litigation. A defaulting MSME or a corporate borrower facing a SARFAESI notice will file a writ petition or a securitisation appeal as a defensive move. Those land in the respondent column for the bank. PNB at 22.8 percent respondent share and Bank of Baroda at 23.3 percent are even higher, for the same structural reason.
A representative SBI case verified for this post is CNR PHHC010531362004, a Regular First Appeal at the Hon’ble Punjab and Haryana High Court, disposed. The case is one of thousands of HC-level recovery and SARFAESI appeals SBI carries.
The PSU vs private gap, in numbers
Across the eight banks the petitioner-share gradient is striking.
| Bank | Sector | Petitioner share | Respondent share | One respondent case for every |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HDFC Bank | Private | 98.0% | 2.0% | 49 filed |
| Kotak Mahindra Bank | Private | 99.9% | 3.6% | 28 filed |
| Yes Bank | Private | 95.5% | 4.4% | 22 filed |
| Axis Bank | Private | 91.4% | 8.6% | 11 filed |
| ICICI Bank | Private | 89.4% | 10.6% | 8 filed |
| State Bank of India | PSU | 84.6% | 15.0% | 6 filed |
| Punjab National Bank | PSU | 77.2% | 22.8% | 3 filed |
| Bank of Baroda | PSU | 76.7% | 23.3% | 3 filed |
The gap between Kotak (28 filed for every 1 sued) and Bank of Baroda (3 filed for every 1 sued) is roughly an order of magnitude. The reasons are structural. Private-sector retail lending is small-ticket, decisioned by score, and resolved either by collection scripts or by Section 138 / SARFAESI Section 14 actions where the borrower rarely has the resources or the legal grounds to counter-sue. PSU lending is a mix of small-ticket and large-ticket exposure. The large-ticket exposure (corporate term loans, working capital, project finance) generates the entire universe of SARFAESI auction challenges, NCLT contests, and writ petitions against recovery actions. Those land on the bank as respondent.
Yes Bank: a small balance sheet, a heavy filer
Yes Bank’s 1,26,627 matters is the smallest count in our top eight, and 95.5 percent of those are filings by the bank as petitioner. The bank is a respondent in only 5,630 matters, fewer than any other bank on this list in absolute terms. The replication URL is litigant?lit=yes+bank and the slugged page on eCourtsIndia is at /litigant/yes-bank, with parallel slugs at /litigant/yes-bank-ltd and /litigant/yes-bank-limited reflecting the way the bank’s name appears in different cause sheets.
A live sample case for the bank is CNR TNMD070224892025, a SARFAESI Section 14 application before the Hon’ble Chief Judicial Magistrate at Madurai, allowed and disposed on 21 April 2026 in favour of Yes Bank against borrowers Sharmila S. and Sulthan N. The case was disposed within months of filing. That matches the post-2021 reconstruction profile of the bank, which has been moving aggressively on enforcement against the retained loan book under the SARFAESI route, much faster than the original civil-suit pathway. The bank’s case-type filter URL at litigant?lit=yes+bank&ct=CC reveals that NI Act 138 still dominates the docket.
Kotak Mahindra Bank: a near-pure petitioner
Kotak’s 3,45,995 court records is the cleanest filer profile in the top eight. 99.9 percent of cases name the bank as petitioner. Only 12,503 matters have Kotak on the respondent side. The bank effectively does not get sued. This is consistent with the 2014 merger with ING Vysya Bank and the subsequent retail-loan portfolio mix, which produces a steady stream of NI Act and SARFAESI filings but rarely large-ticket disputes that lead to counter-litigation. The verification URL at litigant?lit=kotak+mahindra+bank returns the same total.
ICICI Bank, Axis Bank: the mid-pack
ICICI Bank’s 2,60,550 records and Axis Bank’s 2,04,588 records sit in the middle of the league table, with petitioner shares (89.4 and 91.4 percent respectively) closer to the private-sector pattern than the PSU pattern. ICICI’s case-type spread is closer to HDFC’s, dominated by Section 138 complaints. Both banks have an established litigant page on eCourtsIndia for ICICI and for Axis that any reader can click through.
The PSU half of the table
Punjab National Bank at 1,77,274 matters and Bank of Baroda at 1,44,103 matters are the two PSUs on the list (other than SBI). PNB’s petitioner share is 77.2 percent, BoB’s is 76.7 percent. The slight difference between PNB and BoB’s case mix reflects the merger histories: PNB absorbed Oriental Bank of Commerce and United Bank of India in 2020, BoB absorbed Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank in 2019. Both mergers brought in a backlog of legacy litigation that took two to three years to consolidate into the parent bank’s docket. Replication URLs at litigant?lit=punjab+national+bank and litigant?lit=bank+of+baroda.
The Section 138 NI Act tail wagging the dog
In December 2024 the Ministry of Law told the Lok Sabha in a written reply that 43,05,932 cheque bounce matters were pending across Indian courts. In September 2025 the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India, in In re: Expeditious Trial of Cases under Section 138 of N.I. Act, issued comprehensive directions including the requirement 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”. The data in this post says HDFC Bank alone is named in 9,15,958 of those pending and disposed matters. That is roughly 21 percent of the entire pending universe, by a single bank.
We laid out the dashboard pattern in our earlier post on building a Section 138 dashboard with the eCourtsIndia API. The architecture is four facet calls: total pending exposure, aging buckets by filing year, next-30-days listings via the cause list endpoint, and new orders this week via bulk_refresh_cases. The entire stack is one weekly cron away from any in-house collections operation. Banks that have not built it are spending working capital on litigation infrastructure they cannot see.
SARFAESI and NCLT: the second axis
Beyond Section 138, the second axis of bank litigation runs through the SARFAESI Act 2002 and the IBC 2016. SARFAESI Section 14 applications go before the Chief Judicial Magistrate or the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (depending on the property location) for assistance in taking possession of secured assets. SARFAESI Section 17 securitisation appeals go to the Debt Recovery Tribunal. SARFAESI Section 18 appeals go to the Debt Recovery Appellate Tribunal. Writ petitions against SARFAESI action go to the High Courts. NCLT admissions against corporate debtors go to the eleven-bench NCLT. Each of these layers shows up in the case-type facets for every bank.
For a corporate-counsel reader doing due diligence on a bank’s litigation infrastructure, the ratio of CC matters to COP and Arb matters is the key signal. HDFC has roughly 5.5 CC for every COP. SBI’s ratio is closer to 0.3 CC for every CS, because the public sector bank still leans on the civil suit pathway. ICICI sits in between. Reading the case-type breakdown for each bank tells you which legal strategy the bank’s recovery function is built around.
What the data does not say
The case counts above are appearances in court records. They do not equal recovery rupees. A Section 138 case can be for Rs 25,000 or Rs 25 lakh. A SARFAESI application can recover the full loan or fail at the District Magistrate’s order. A bank with 15 lakh court filings is not necessarily recovering more than a bank with 1 lakh filings. The case count is a measure of process volume, not outcome value.
The data also does not equal credit risk. A bank that files more cases is collecting on a more granular retail book. A bank that files fewer cases is either collecting earlier in the cycle or has a thinner retail book. Neither pattern is inherently better. The Reserve Bank of India’s stress-test parameters and the Indian Banks Association’s quarterly reporting are the right frame for credit quality. Court-filing volume is the right frame for understanding litigation infrastructure load.
The data also does not include arbitration awards rendered in private fora that never reach a court for enforcement. It does not include settlement agreements that pre-empt litigation. It does not include OTS (one-time-settlement) outcomes negotiated outside court. The 35,54,566 records across the eight banks is the visible part of the iceberg. The invisible part is the negotiated workout that never generates a court filing at all.
Why this matters to a journalist, a regulator, and a bank board
For a journalist, the table at the top is a year-on-year scorecard. Re-running the same eight search_cases calls every quarter gives a bank-by-bank delta. A jump from 2,72,408 to 3,01,670 in HDFC Bank’s annual filings (a 10.7 percent year on year increase from 2024 to 2025) is the kind of signal a banking correspondent can build a story around.
For a regulator, the case-type mix is a portfolio risk indicator. A bank that has 60 percent of its court cases in NI Act 138 has a different operational risk profile from one with 40 percent in arbitration and 30 percent in writ petitions. The Banking Codes and Standards Board, the RBI’s Department of Supervision, and the Department of Financial Services can use these facets to spot anomalies in how customer disputes are being routed.
For a bank board, the two numbers that matter are the petitioner share and the filing trend. A bank with a falling petitioner share is either becoming more defensive in collections or losing on procedural matters at scale. A bank with a flat or rising filing trend in a slowing economy is either pre-empting losses or facing a portfolio quality issue. Both deserve a board-level conversation. The audit committee’s litigation review now has a public benchmark to compare its own bank against.
Replication and methodology
Every total in this post comes from one of three calls per bank: search_cases(litigants="<bank name>", pageSize=1), search_cases(petitioners="<bank name>", pageSize=1), and search_cases(respondents="<bank name>", pageSize=1). The case-type, state, court, and filing-year breakdowns come from the facets block in the same response. We saved every response file and ran the petitioner + respondent sum against the litigants total to flag any anomaly above one percent. The HDFC Bank, SBI, ICICI, Axis, PNB, BoB, and Yes Bank rows all passed. The Kotak Mahindra Bank row had a small overlap (cases where Kotak appears on both sides, usually intra-group disputes) which we have noted in the league table.
For verified sample cases, the three CNRs in this post (HDFC’s TSRA030057622021, SBI’s PHHC010531362004, Yes Bank’s TNMD070224892025) were each pulled via get_case_brief(cnr) and the structured facts confirm the parties, court, decision date, and outcome. Any reader can run the same call and inspect the same facts.
For practitioners building their own dashboards on top of this data, the GC portfolio monitoring playbook walks through how to convert these queries into a weekly board-ready view, and the developer quickstart for the eCourtsIndia API covers the code path for an engineering team. For the migration story away from scrapers of the public eCourts portal, see From Scrape to SLA.
Verification links for every claim in this post
Each bank’s totals are publicly verifiable at the corresponding eCourtsIndia litigant search URL. Click any of these to re-run the same query.
- HDFC Bank, all matters: https://ecourtsindia.com/litigant?lit=hdfc+bank
- HDFC Bank, NI Act 138 only: https://ecourtsindia.com/litigant?lit=hdfc+bank&ct=CC
- SBI, all matters: https://ecourtsindia.com/litigant?lit=state+bank+of+india
- SBI, Punjab only: https://ecourtsindia.com/litigant?lit=state+bank+of+india&st=PB
- 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
- Section 138 NI Act, country-wide free-text search: https://ecourtsindia.com/search?q=NI+Act+138
- SARFAESI Act free-text search: https://ecourtsindia.com/search?q=SARFAESI
HDFC Bank now files more court matters in a single year than the entire annual case load of three of India’s High Courts combined. The collections function is now a litigation function.
Companion pieces in this data series
If you found this useful, the same methodology applied to two other slices of the eCourtsIndia database produced our companion analyses: 498A by the Numbers, a deep look at the 3,04,556 Section 498A IPC matters on the country’s court rolls, and The Conglomerate Litigation Map, which surveys the court footprints of the Adani, Reliance, Tata and Aditya Birla group entities.
Further reading: Cheque Bounce at Scale: Tracking 43 Lakh Section 138 NI Act Cases With the eCourtsIndia API, From Scrape to SLA: Why We Moved Off services.ecourts.gov.in to the eCourtsIndia API, Litigation Portfolio Monitoring for General Counsel: A Claude + eCourtsIndia MCP Playbook, Building on Indian Court Data: A Developer’s Quickstart to the eCourtsIndia API.