Maharashtra is the most heavily indexed state in the eCourtsIndia database. The reasons are structural: it is the second-most populous state, the country’s commercial capital, the home of the largest civic body in India by budget, and the home of one of the country’s busiest high courts. Every part of the state government, from the Mantralaya cabinet down to the talathi at a tehsil-level revenue office, leaves a court trail. This post is the first comprehensive census of that trail. We pulled a single litigant search for each major Maharashtra government body on 8 May 2026 and ranked them by indexed court footprint. The numbers are uncomfortably specific.
The headline league table
| Rank | Body | Total records | Pending | Disposed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| U | State of Maharashtra (Bombay HC AS bench only) | 5,58,291 | 1,31,142 | 4,27,148 |
| 01 | Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (BMC / MCGM) | 42,357 | 16,150 | 25,192 |
| 02 | Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution (MSEDCL) | 19,751 | 6,812 | 12,605 |
| 03 | Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) | 16,723 | 4,790 | 11,693 |
| 04 | Mumbai Police (Commissioner of Police, Greater Mumbai) | 16,466 | 4,447 | 11,862 |
| 05 | Maharashtra State Road Transport Corp (MSRTC) | 16,200 | 5,114 | 10,865 |
| 06 | CIDCO of Maharashtra | 7,567 | 2,544 | 4,955 |
| 07 | Nagpur Municipal Corporation | 5,552 | 1,563 | 3,890 |
| 08 | Thane Municipal Corporation | 5,339 | 1,611 | 3,621 |
| 09 | Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) | 5,017 | 1,192 | 3,781 |
| 10 | Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation (NMMC) | 2,479 | 926 | 1,497 |
| 11 | Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) | 1,838 | 902 | 525 |
| 12 | Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) | 1,145 | 271 | 864 |
The methodology is consistent with our Ministry Litigation Index and PSU Litigation Index: each total is a single litigant search at ecourtsindia.com/litigant?lit=<name> on 8 May 2026, captured at page size 1 with the totalHits field. Pending and disposed counts come from the same call’s caseStatus facet. Anyone can replicate any row in under a minute.
Why "State of Maharashtra" sits at 5.58 lakh and what that number actually means
The umbrella search for “State of Maharashtra” returns several million records when run unfiltered against the eCourtsIndia index, because that phrase appears in every criminal complaint, every revenue dispute, every challan-related matter and every constitutional writ filed in the state. To get a workable umbrella number we filtered the search to a single court — the Bombay High Court Appellate Side bench (HCBM01) — which is the principal seat for civil and writ jurisdiction. That filtered count is 5,58,291. Of those, 1,31,142 are presently flagged PENDING and 4,27,148 are DISPOSED. The case-type mix is 1,83,808 Writ Petitions (Civil), 68,250 Civil Miscellaneous Applications, 49,868 Bail Applications, 46,641 First Appeals, 44,692 Civil Appeals, and a long tail.
Read this number the way you would read “Union of India” in our Ministry Litigation Index: it is not a working metric of state-government performance, because every citizen-led writ pulls the state into the cause sheet. The useful slices are the per-body numbers below.
The civic-body story: BMC dwarfs the rest
BMC’s 42,357 indexed records are more than the next three civic bodies combined. That is partly a function of size — BMC’s annual budget is larger than Pune, Nagpur and Thane budgets put together — and partly a function of Mumbai’s writ-driven civic culture. We have written a complete deep dive on the BMC docket in our BMC Court Docket piece, which sits alongside this census. The short version: 70 percent of BMC’s footprint is at the Bombay High Court, the 2023 fresh-filing year was double the 2022 number, and 38 percent of the indexed BMC docket is currently pending.
Pune Municipal Corporation’s 16,723 records is the second-largest civic footprint. The case mix is led by Civil Suits (6,290), Criminal Complaint Cases (2,483) and Writ Petitions (1,938). The geography is concentrated at Pune district court (5,068 matters at the Civil Court Senior Division alone), reflecting the trial-court tilt of PMC’s docket. Roughly 4,790 of the 16,723 are pending. PMC’s 2014 spike year — 2,715 dispositions in a single year — reflects a one-off octroi-related cleanup that does not appear in the BMC pattern.
Nagpur Municipal Corporation’s 5,552 records and Thane Municipal Corporation’s 5,339 records are nearly identical, suggesting that civic litigation footprints scale roughly linearly with city size and budget once you cross the 25-lakh population threshold. Both bodies have a Bombay HC Nagpur bench tilt for the Vidarbha-region body and a Bombay HC AS bench tilt for the Konkan-region body, exactly as the constitutional jurisdiction allocation predicts.
The utility story: MSEDCL and MSRTC together carry 36,000 cases
Two state-owned utilities dominate the second tier of the census. MSEDCL, the state electricity distribution company, sits at 19,751 records. The case mix is heavy on UNKNOWN (6,446) and Sessions Cases (4,057), reflecting the volume of electricity-theft prosecutions under Section 135 of the Electricity Act, 2003. The geography is concentrated in Aurangabad district (3,392 matters at the Sessions Court alone) and the Bombay HC Aurangabad bench, which together cover the heavily prosecuted Marathwada belt.
MSRTC, the state road-transport corporation, sits at 16,200 records. The case mix is dominated by Motor Accident Claims Appeals (4,688) and Writ Petitions (2,714) — the operational footprint of any large bus operator. The geography is statewide, with the Bombay HC AS bench (4,070), the Nagpur bench (2,064) and the Aurangabad bench (1,878) leading. The fresh-filing curve has run roughly flat for a decade, with a recent uptick in 2024 (1,495) and 2025 (1,515) that tracks the post-pandemic increase in bus-related accident claims.
The police story: 16,466 records carry a different fingerprint
Mumbai Police records are the most operationally distinctive in the census. The case mix is dominated by Criminal Complaint Cases (3,883), Bail Applications (2,336), Anticipatory Bail Applications (2,107) and Sessions Cases (1,689). The geography is concentrated at Metropolitan Magistrate Mumbai Central (5,840 matters), City Sessions Court Mumbai (4,697), and the various Mumbai magistrate courts. The fresh-filing curve has spiked dramatically in the past three years: 1,713 in 2024, 4,705 in 2025, and 1,557 in the first 18 weeks of 2026. That spike is the procedural footprint of two trends — the post-2023 Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita rollout, which generated a wave of fresh complaint registrations, and the Mumbai Police’s stepped-up enforcement against organised cyber-fraud and mule-account operations during 2025.
The development authorities: CIDCO and MHADA, 12,584 cases between them
CIDCO at 7,567 and MHADA at 5,017 are the two heaviest urban-development authorities. Their dockets share a feature: both are dominated by trial-court land matters. CIDCO’s case mix is led by Civil Suits (2,748), Land Acquisition Cases (718) and Civil Appeals (712). The geography is heavily Konkan-region: 2,391 matters at Raigad district, 1,273 at Belapur and 705 at Panvel, the operational footprint of the Navi Mumbai project. MHADA’s 5,017 records are concentrated in Mumbai (3,678 of the 5,017 are at Mumbai’s City Civil Court at MHCC01), reflecting the body’s role in the BDD-chawl and Mumbai-mill-land redevelopments.
The smaller bodies: NMMC, MPCB, MMRDA
The three smallest bodies in the census are operationally instructive. Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation at 2,479 records carries a case mix similar to BMC’s at one-tenth the scale. The Maharashtra Pollution Control Board at 1,838 records is the only body in the census where pending exceeds disposed (902 vs 525), reflecting the slow pace of environmental-violation prosecutions and the recent MPCB-led actions against the Tarapur and Dombivli MIDC clusters. The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority at 1,145 records carries the smallest footprint by a wide margin, despite running infrastructure budgets in the same league as BMC. The reason is structural: most MMRDA contract disputes are arbitrated rather than litigated, and the contracts are typically with large infrastructure majors who settle through commercial mediation rather than going to court.
The pendency picture across the census
Across the twelve named bodies in the census, total indexed records sum to 1,55,490. Of those, roughly 47,300 are pending. That works out to a 30.4 percent state-wide pendency share for major Maharashtra government bodies, slightly below BMC’s 38.1 percent. The body with the highest pending share is the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board at 49 percent, where a small docket and slow disposition pace combine. The body with the lowest pending share is MMRDA at 24 percent, where dispute volumes are small and most matters are fast-tracked through arbitration.
What this census tells us, taken together
Three patterns become visible once you put all twelve rows next to each other. First, civic litigation in Maharashtra scales with city size and city budget but not in a clean linear way. BMC sits at 42,357 records, almost three times PMC’s 16,723. That is roughly proportional to budget. Below the metro-level civic bodies (BMC, PMC, NMC, TMC, NMMC), the case counts drop sharply because tier-2 city corporations like Aurangabad, Nashik, Solapur and Kolhapur do not yet generate Bombay HC-level writ traffic at the same volume.
Second, the utility-and-transport corporations (MSEDCL, MSRTC) have grown steadily but quietly. MSEDCL alone added more than 1,500 fresh filings in 2025, and the trend is up. The Sessions Court tilt of MSEDCL’s docket is unusual for a state-owned utility and reflects the volume of Section 135 prosecutions for power theft.
Third, Mumbai Police’s 4,705 fresh filings in 2025 is the standout single-year number in the census, more than the BMC fresh-filing rate, more than MSEDCL’s, more than any other body’s. The post-BNS surge is real and durable.
What this data does not say
Two important caveats apply. The eCourtsIndia search is a name-based litigant lookup. Cases where the body is referred to in court papers as “the Corporation” or “the Authority” without the full statutory name will not surface in a single litigant search; a complete count would require additional name-variant searches. Where overlap exists between common variants — for example MCGM and Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation — we have used the larger of the two as the headline number to avoid double-counting. The figures here therefore should be read as the principal indexed footprint, not as a complete enumeration.
Second, the eCourtsIndia index does not store rupee values of claims or awards as a structured field. The economic impact of this docket has to be inferred from case type, hearing count, duration and the small number of orders where the disposal value is captured in the order text. The arbitration tail and the contempt tail are the two best proxies for economic exposure, and we have flagged both for BMC in the companion BMC deep dive.
How to replicate every number in this post
Each row in the league table can be re-pulled in under a minute. Start at ecourtsindia.com, set the litigant field to the name of the body, and read the totalHits number. Use the case-status filter to read pending and disposed counts. The same data is available through the eCourtsIndia API for institutional research subscribers. For methodology and the data layer, see From Scrape to SLA: Why We Moved Off services.ecourts.gov.in to the eCourtsIndia API.
What we are tracking next
We will refresh this Maharashtra census every quarter. The four numbers most worth watching over the next twelve months are: BMC fresh filings (does the post-2023 baseline hold or revert), Mumbai Police fresh filings (is the BNS-driven surge a one-year spike or a permanent shift), MSEDCL pending count (does the Section 135 backlog clear or compound), and MPCB disposal rate (is the body finally working through its environmental-prosecution arrears). We will also expand the census to cover Aurangabad, Nashik, Solapur and Kolhapur municipal corporations, plus the state-level Revenue and PWD departments, in our next refresh.
If a reader wants any specific Maharashtra body broken out, write to us at admin@ecourtsindia.com and we will add it to the next refresh.