The Government of India is the largest litigant in the country. That headline truth hides a more useful one. The Government does not litigate as one block. It litigates through dozens of Public Sector Undertakings, statutory regulators, and quasi-government bodies that each have their own court footprint. Some of those footprints are enormous. Punjab National Bank shows up in 1,77,679 court records on the eCourtsIndia database. Bank of Baroda in 1,44,453. The National Highways Authority of India in 33,776. Indian Oil Corporation in 28,929. Life Insurance Corporation of India in 16,323. The Reserve Bank of India in 13,626. Coal India in 13,310. GAIL India in 11,489. HPCL in 11,039. BPCL in 10,617. NTPC in 9,051. Air India in 7,191. ONGC in 6,918. SEBI in 5,981. The Airports Authority of India in 3,050. Each of those numbers is a snapshot of a specific kind of state load on the courts: contract recovery, land acquisition arbitration, regulatory writs, service matter appeals, tax references. This post pulls every one of those numbers from the eCourtsIndia litigant search, sorts them into a league table, and explains what the case mix at each entity tells you about how that part of the Indian state actually behaves in court.
The headline league table
| Rank | Entity | Sector | Total court records |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Punjab National Bank | Public sector bank | 1,77,679 |
| 2 | Bank of Baroda | Public sector bank | 1,44,453 |
| 3 | NHAI | Highways infra | 33,776 |
| 4 | Indian Oil Corporation | Oil refining | 28,929 |
| 5 | LIC of India | Life insurance | 16,323 |
| 6 | Reserve Bank of India | Central banking regulator | 13,626 |
| 7 | Coal India | Coal mining | 13,310 |
| 8 | GAIL India | Natural gas | 11,489 |
| 9 | HPCL | Oil refining | 11,039 |
| 10 | BPCL | Oil refining | 10,617 |
| 11 | NTPC | Power generation | 9,051 |
| 12 | Air India | Aviation | 7,191 |
| 13 | ONGC | Oil and gas exploration | 6,918 |
| 14 | SEBI | Securities regulator | 5,981 |
| 15 | Airports Authority of India | Airport operations | 3,050 |
| 16 | NABARD | Agri-finance | 402 |
| 17 | SIDBI | MSME finance | 223 |
Each total comes from a single search_cases(litigants="<entity name>", pageSize=1) call against the eCourtsIndia API on 27 April 2026. The replication URL for any row is https://ecourtsindia.com/litigant?lit=<entity+name>. For example, the PNB total can be verified at https://ecourtsindia.com/litigant?lit=punjab+national+bank and the NHAI total at https://ecourtsindia.com/litigant?lit=national+highways+authority+of+india. We have written before about how this same litigant-search endpoint powers the Bank Litigation Index of HDFC, SBI, and the top eight private and public banks, where HDFC Bank alone showed up in 15,60,124 matters. Once you see those numbers next to each other, the PSU pattern becomes clear: the financial-services PSUs sit in the same heavy-litigation tier as private banks, while the energy and infra PSUs operate one to two orders of magnitude smaller.
What PNB and Bank of Baroda are doing in court 1.77 lakh and 1.44 lakh times
The single most striking row is Punjab National Bank at 1,77,679 court records. PNB’s case-type breakdown is dominated by Civil Suit (CS) recovery actions filed in the bank’s name across district and commercial courts, followed by Civil Appeal (CA) and Civil Miscellaneous Application (CMAppl). Geographic concentration is highest in Delhi, Maharashtra, and Karnataka. The pattern fits a public sector lender with a big corporate-loan book and a high SARFAESI-driven enforcement engine.
Bank of Baroda is right behind at 1,44,453. Its mix is similar: Civil Suit, Civil Appeal, Civil Miscellaneous Application, with Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Uttar Pradesh as the top three states. The biggest gap with the private banks is the petitioner share. In the bank-litigation index we showed that HDFC Bank is petitioner in 98 percent of its matters, while PNB is petitioner in around 77 percent and Bank of Baroda in around 76 percent. PSU lenders end up on the respondent side roughly one in four times. That is not a quality issue. It is a portfolio-mix issue. PSU corporate-loan books face larger ticket disputes, more SARFAESI auction challenges, and more writ petitions from defaulting MSMEs and corporate borrowers. Each of those routes drags the bank into the respondent column.
For a PSU bank board, the working metric is not the absolute case count but the petitioner share trend. A drop from 77 percent to 70 percent over four quarters is a flag that the bank is losing more procedural battles or facing more counter-litigation. A rise above 85 percent is a flag that the recovery machine is running too hot relative to the in-house legal team’s bandwidth.
NHAI at 33,776: arbitration is the state’s quiet workhorse
NHAI’s 33,776 court records is the largest non-bank PSU footprint and one of the most informative. The case-type breakdown is dominated by Arbitration Petition (ARB_PET), Civil Appeal (CA), and Civil Suit (CS). The arbitration share is what matters. NHAI signs land acquisition compensation references and EPC contract claims into arbitration as a matter of standard process. Every disputed land award and every disputed contract milestone potentially generates one arbitration. The 33,776 is the cumulative residue of fifteen years of highway expansion.
Maharashtra, Haryana, and Delhi are the top three states. Haryana is the surprise. The state’s small geographical size relative to its highway density (the Delhi-Mumbai expressway and the entire western corridor) shows up in court records as a heavy land-acquisition arbitration cluster. For an infrastructure analyst, NHAI’s ARB_PET share is the cleanest statistical proxy in the country for "how much friction is highway acquisition generating right now." Anyone tracking the toll-road sector can pull this number quarterly to flag execution stress.
A sample matter on the eCourtsIndia database is an NHAI arbitration application before the Delhi High Court Arbitration Division, registered in 2015, where the question is the quantum of compensation for compulsorily acquired farmland. Multiply that single case by 33,776 and you get a real measure of how much process volume the highway program imposes on the courts.
The oil and gas tier: ONGC, IOC, BPCL, HPCL, GAIL
The Indian oil and gas PSUs cluster in the 7,000 to 30,000 range:
- Indian Oil Corporation: 28,929
- GAIL India: 11,489
- HPCL: 11,039
- BPCL: 10,617
- ONGC: 6,918
Indian Oil’s 28,929 is the highest because IOC is the country’s largest fuel distributor, runs the densest dealer network, and sits in the most contracts. The case mix skews toward commercial disputes (CS, civil appeals, dealer agreement enforcement) rather than the arbitration concentration you see at NHAI. The geography is heaviest in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Gujarat, mirroring fuel demand and refinery proximity.
ONGC at 6,918 is the smallest of the energy majors, partly because upstream exploration generates fewer dealer-facing disputes and partly because most ONGC contracts are large EPC or seismic-survey arbitrations that go to international or institutional arbitration outside the eCourtsIndia index. The Gujarat concentration (the company’s home state and the Mumbai High operating base) accounts for 38 percent of ONGC’s total court footprint.
GAIL’s 11,489 is heavily skewed to Civil Miscellaneous Appeal (CMA) at the district-court level, mostly land-acquisition appeals tied to gas pipeline rights of way. Gujarat alone accounts for 70 percent of GAIL’s record count. The bulk of the Hazira-Vijaipur-Jagdishpur and DUPL-DPPL pipeline corridors generated their compensation disputes through the Vadodara, Bharuch, and Godhra district court complexes.
HPCL’s 11,039 has its own fingerprint: First Appeal (FA) and Writ Petition (Civil) are the top two case types, with Punjab as the dominant state at 808 matters and Maharashtra at 752. The Punjab concentration reflects the company’s retail dealer base in the green-field corridor along NH-1 and NH-44.
BPCL’s 10,617 is the most evenly distributed energy PSU geographically, with Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and Gujarat as the top three states. BPCL also has the highest share of UNKNOWN case-type entries because a portion of its district-court entries are filed under court-specific case types that the central index has not yet mapped.
NTPC at 9,051 is dominated by Civil Miscellaneous Application (CMAppl) at 2,539 and CC (criminal complaint, mostly cheque bounce against contractors and small vendors) at 783. Himachal Pradesh leads with 3,529 matters. That reflects the cluster of Sutlej and Beas valley hydro projects (Koldam, Rampur, Parbati) where a high volume of small-vendor disputes feed into magistrate-level complaints.
Coal India at 13,310 is dominated by Writ Petition (Civil) at 3,377 and Writ Appeal (WA) at 2,820. West Bengal leads at 5,766 matters. That fingerprint is unmistakable: the Jharia-Raniganj-Asansol coalfield generates a constant flow of land, displacement, and surface-rights writ petitions through the Calcutta High Court appellate side, which alone accounts for 2,606 of those matters.
Banking and finance PSUs: LIC, NABARD, SIDBI
LIC at 16,323 sits between the big public-sector banks and the smaller energy PSUs. LIC’s case mix is heavily writ-driven (policyholder grievance writs at high courts) plus a long tail of policy-payment civil suits at the district courts. The geographic distribution leads with Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Delhi, which fits the corporation’s branch density and the Bombay-Bangalore-Delhi corridor of higher-value policy disputes.
NABARD’s 402 and SIDBI’s 223 are the two outliers at the small end. Both institutions are wholesale-only lenders. They do not face retail customer litigation. Their matters are concentrated on co-operative bank refinance disputes (NABARD) and IBC-route MSME refinance recoveries (SIDBI). SIDBI’s case mix is the most distinctive of any PSU on this list: 30 of its 223 matters are Interlocutory Applications under the IBC, filed at the NCLT benches, mostly asserting financial-creditor claims in corporate insolvency processes.
Regulators in court: SEBI, RBI, IRDAI, TRAI
SEBI’s 5,981 is the largest regulator footprint. The top three case types are UNKNOWN (1,812 entries, mostly local filing-system codes the central index has not yet mapped), Civil Appeal (1,208), and Writ Petition Civil (882). That third category is the operative one. Roughly 880 writ petitions across the country are pending or disposed in which SEBI is a party, almost all challenging show-cause notices, ad-interim orders, and adjudication orders. The case load shows annual growth: 2018 had 231 fresh filings, 2025 had 409, 2026 already at 103 by April.
RBI’s 13,626 is more than double SEBI’s count. The case mix leans heavily toward Writ Petition Civil (6,144 of 13,626, or 45 percent), with the Madras, Kerala, Delhi, and Punjab and Haryana high courts as the four highest-volume venues. RBI is named as a party in any writ that questions a banking-regulation circular, an NBFC licensing decision, or a depositor-protection action. The 5x growth in fresh filings from 2018 to 2025 (340 to 1,792) is the litigation footprint of the post-2018 NBFC stress cycle and the IL&FS, DHFL, and Yes Bank reconstruction frameworks.
The smaller statutory regulators have small but visible footprints. IRDAI, TRAI, FSSAI, the Competition Commission of India, and PFRDA each generate a few hundred to a couple of thousand records. The same litigant=<name> URL pattern works for each.
We covered the related theme of how regulatory writs interact with the banking system in our piece on the Section 138 cheque bounce dashboard built on the eCourtsIndia API, which explains how a single legal instrument can produce 43 lakh pending matters in the magistrate courts.
Air India, IRCTC, AAI: the transport tier
Air India’s 7,191 is the smallest of the major transport entries. The case mix is service-matter-heavy (employee claims, pension disputes, residual contract litigation from the pre-Tata divestment phase). The Airports Authority of India’s 3,050 sits in the same bracket and is dominated by Writ Petition (Civil) at 931 of 3,050, mostly land-acquisition and airport-zoning challenges. Delhi (609 matters) and Maharashtra (555) lead, which is the operational fingerprint of Indira Gandhi International and Chhatrapati Shivaji airports.
What the data does not say
The case counts above are appearances in court records. They do not equal recovery rupees, regulatory penalties collected, or projects completed. A single Civil Suit from PNB might be for a Rs 5 lakh personal loan or a Rs 500 crore corporate facility. A single NHAI arbitration might involve Rs 50 lakh of farmland compensation or a Rs 2,000 crore EPC contract dispute. The case count is a measure of process volume, not outcome value.
The data also does not capture matters that go to bodies outside the eCourtsIndia integration, including the international arbitration tribunals where many PSU contracts are eventually fought, the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal where a large share of the tax disputes sit, and the consumer commission system at district, state, and national level.
Why this matters to a journalist, a regulator, and a board
For a financial journalist, the league table at the top of this post is a quarterly scoreboard. Re-run the same seventeen searches every three months and you have a dataset that captures the growth of the PSU bank recovery engine, the flow of land-acquisition disputes onto NHAI’s docket, the build-up of regulatory writs against SEBI, RBI, and the smaller statutory regulators, and the transport-sector litigation residue from divestments and tariff orders.
For a regulator, the relative size of each PSU’s case mix is a portfolio risk indicator. A PSU bank with 95 percent of its matters in Civil Suits (recovery) and 5 percent in writ petitions is running a very different operational risk profile from a PSU bank with 70 percent in suits and 25 percent in writ petitions.
For a PSU board, the running metrics are: petitioner share, year-on-year filings growth, and case-type concentration. A petitioner share that drops more than five percentage points in a year usually means the recovery process is losing procedural battles. A filings growth that outpaces the loan book is a flag for credit quality.
We covered the underlying playbook for using court-case data to track corporate behaviour in our piece on the Conglomerate Litigation Index covering Reliance, Tata, Adani, and the top private business groups. The methodology is identical. The PSU index in this post is the public-sector equivalent of that private-sector reading.
Replication and methodology
For institutional research access to the eCourtsIndia API directly, see the eCourtsIndia API and integration page. For the longer thematic analysis on how this data flows together at the macro level, see our Court Data Stories index on blogs.ecourtsindia.com.
If any reader has a request for a specific PSU we have not covered in this index, write to us at admin@ecourtsindia.com and we will add it to the next quarterly refresh.