TDSAT and APTEL Case Status on eCourtsIndia: Search Every Telecom, Broadcasting and Electricity Appeal

Last updated: 23 September 2026.

To check a TDSAT or APTEL case status, open eCourtsIndia search with the tribunal filter and type a party name or paste the 16-character CNR. The Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal and the Appellate Tribunal for Electricity sit in the same free index as the Supreme Court, the High Courts, the district courts and 18 tribunal and commission types, so you do not need a separate tribunal portal. TDSAT alone carries 19,000+ matters on the platform. The free-text box reads inside the full text of uploaded orders, not just the case headers. This guide shows how to find a telecom, broadcasting or electricity matter, what the case-type codes mean, and how to keep track of it once you have found it.

Key takeaways

• TDSAT is searchable on ecourtsindia.com/search with 19,000+ matters indexed, most of them broadcasting petitions.
• APTEL is searchable too, at its Principal Bench in New Delhi, covering electricity, petroleum and natural gas, and energy conservation appeals. Its ordinary appeals alone run past 8,700 records.
• Each tribunal opens with a single cc= link. The case-type codes carry the meaning, so a broadcasting petition sits under TDSDLBP and an electricity appeal under APTDLAL.
• No filing number to CNR? The tribunal CNR generator builds the CNR for both TDSAT and APTEL.
• Search by party name, by CNR or by case type, then read the orders, with no login and no paid ranking. Track a case with WhatsApp or email alerts for Rs 5 a month.

Where TDSAT and APTEL fit on eCourtsIndia

TDSAT and APTEL are the regulatory appeal layer of Indian litigation. They decide how the telecom, broadcasting, power and energy sectors are run, and on eCourtsIndia they sit alongside every other court and tribunal you can already search. You search them the same way you search the NCLT and NCLAT, the ITAT and CESTAT or the Securities Appellate Tribunal. The regulators whose orders reach these tribunals, and the competition and securities regulators covered in our guide to CCI, SEBI and GST AAAR orders, together make up most of the sector-regulation caseload in India.

If you have ever tried to follow a tariff order appeal or an interconnection dispute across the official tribunal websites, you know the records are hard to read together. eCourtsIndia stitches them into one searchable index. For the full map of every court, bench and cause list on the platform, keep our India courts and eCourts access directory open as the hub.

What TDSAT and APTEL are

The Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT) is the specialist tribunal for telecom and broadcasting disputes in India, and the Appellate Tribunal for Electricity (APTEL) is the appellate forum for the power and energy sector. TDSAT was set up under the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India Act, 1997, as amended in 2000, to settle disputes between service providers, between a provider and a group of consumers, and to hear appeals against directions and orders of the regulator. Its work later widened to broadcasting and cable matters, and after the Finance Act, 2017 it also took over the cyber appeals that the Cyber Appellate Tribunal used to hear. It sits in New Delhi. Appeals on its telecom, broadcasting and electricity-adjacent work go to the Supreme Court, while its inherited cyber matters under the Information Technology Act, 2000 are appealable to the High Court.

APTEL was established under the Electricity Act, 2003, and began functioning in 2005. It hears appeals against the orders of the Central and State Electricity Regulatory Commissions and the adjudicating officers under that Act, which is where tariff, open access, licensing and penalty disputes are fought. Its remit has since grown to act as the appellate tribunal under the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board Act, 2006, and to hear matters under the Energy Conservation Act, 2001. The case types recorded on the platform reflect exactly that mix, with electricity matters forming the bulk and smaller streams for petroleum and natural gas and for energy conservation. In plain terms, if you are fighting a telecom or broadcasting dispute you may end up at TDSAT, and if you are challenging an electricity regulator’s order you may end up at APTEL. The data on eCourtsIndia lets you follow either matter along that path.

The TDSAT case types you will see

TDSAT is a single national tribunal at New Delhi rather than a network of benches, so the way you narrow a search is by case type rather than by city. The tribunal uses a specific vocabulary of case-type codes, and a wrong code returns nothing, so it helps to know the main ones. The table below shows the indexed counts across the whole tribunal, checked on 23 September 2026. They grow as new filings come in, so read the live count off the search page. The codes here are a snapshot for reference; the authoritative, always-current list of case types and court codes (including all 18 live tribunal families) lives in the eCourtsIndia API enums (programmatic GET https://webapi.ecourtsindia.com/api/partner/enums).

Case type	Code	What it is	Indexed matters
Broadcasting Petition	TDSDLBP	Disputes in the broadcasting and cable sector	10,368
Miscellaneous Application	TDSDLMA	Applications filed inside an ongoing matter	5,506
Telecom Petition	TDSDLTP	Disputes in the telecom sector	2,196
Execution Application	TDSDLEA	Applications to enforce a TDSAT order	375
Cyber Appeal	TDSDLCY	Appeals carried over from the Cyber Appellate Tribunal	231
Review Application	TDSDLRA	A request to review a TDSAT order	209
Telecom Appeal	TDSDLTA	Appeals against the regulator’s orders	142

The shape of this caseload tells a real story. Broadcasting petitions outnumber telecom petitions by close to five to one, because the carriage, interconnection and pricing disputes between broadcasters, multi-system operators and distribution platforms are some of the most litigated questions in Indian media. The Miscellaneous Applications sit on top of those main matters as the day-to-day procedural traffic. To make sense of where any of these stand, the case status dictionary explains every status code in plain English.

APTEL on eCourtsIndia

APTEL is searchable at its Principal Bench in New Delhi. Like TDSAT it is a single tribunal rather than a network of regional benches, so you narrow by case type. The ordinary Appeal, code APTDLAL, is the heart of its work, with 8,700+ records on the platform. The other streams handle contempt, review, original and execution matters.

Case type	Code	What it is
Appeal	APTDLAL	The ordinary appeal against a regulator’s order
Original Petition	APTDLOP	A matter filed directly before the tribunal
Contempt Petition	APTDLCP	Action for disobedience of a tribunal order
Execution Petition	APTDLEP	A petition to enforce an APTEL order
Review Petition	APTDLRP	A request to review an APTEL order

A note on the APTEL numbers, because we would rather be precise than impressive. On 23 September 2026 the four smaller APTEL codes (original, contempt, execution and review petitions) each showed almost exactly the same count, a little over 5,000 records apiece. Real caseloads do not line up like that, so we are treating those four figures as a data issue under review rather than as four separate facts, and we are not quoting them here. The appeal count is not affected. Search any APTEL matter by name or CNR as usual, and read the current totals straight off the APTEL search page rather than from a number in a blog post.

How to check a TDSAT or APTEL case status

To check a TDSAT or APTEL case status, open eCourtsIndia search, filter to the tribunal, then search by the party name or the CNR. There are three reliable routes, depending on what you already know.

1. By party name. If you know the company or the operator, type the name into the free-text box and add the tribunal filter. Open TDSAT here or APTEL here and search the name. The index matches party names on both sides, so it works whether your name is the appellant or the respondent, and the regulator or a rival operator is often the other party. To trace one name across every court and tribunal at once, drop the filter and search the name alone, or use the dedicated litigant search.

2. By CNR. Every matter, including every TDSAT and APTEL case, carries a 16 character CNR (Case Number Record, the permanent national ID for a case) that never changes, even if the case is transferred or renumbered. The CNR begins with the case-type code, so TDSDLBP for a TDSAT broadcasting petition or APTDLAL for an APTEL appeal, followed by the running number and year. Paste the CNR into the search and you land on that exact case. If you are not sure how to read the code, our guide on the CNR number decoded walks through each character.

If you only have the TDSAT filing or registration number, the tribunal CNR generator for TDSAT turns the bench, case type, number and year into the 16-character CNR that eCourtsIndia uses, so you can open the case directly. Our explainer on how eCourtsIndia mints a tribunal CNR walks through the format for all 14 supported tribunals. APTEL has its own page on the APTEL CNR generator.

3. By tribunal, then filter. If you want to browse rather than look up one matter, open the tribunal with its cc= link and use the sidebar to narrow by case type, status and filing year. This is the route a regulatory counsel or a researcher takes when scanning every pending broadcasting petition at TDSAT, or every electricity appeal at APTEL. There is no special operator syntax to learn here: you type natural keywords, a party name or a CNR, and the search reads across the case records and the full order text. For the full set of filters and parameters behind all of this, our eCourtsIndia search guide is the reference to keep open in another tab.

Reading orders and cause lists

Search is only the first step. Once you are on a case, eCourtsIndia gives you the order sheet and, where uploaded, the full text of every order and judgment. For these tribunals, where the reasoning in a tariff order or an interconnection dispute can run to many pages and shape an entire sector, full-text access is the difference between knowing a case was decided and knowing how it was decided. The free-text box searches inside that order text, so you can find every matter where a particular regulation, section or argument appears, which is exactly how a regulatory team builds a line of authority.

If you act in these matters, you can also pull the daily cause list, the official schedule of cases set down for hearing on a given day, the same workflow we describe for any court. As the order coverage for these tribunals deepens, the same full-text search that already powers the rest of the platform will reach across the whole regulatory appeal record.

Who this helps

The people who get the most out of this are the ones who live in the regulated sectors. Telecom and broadcasting counsel can track every carriage, interconnection or licensing dispute for a client from one screen. Power-sector legal teams, generators, distribution companies and large industrial consumers can watch the tariff and open-access appeals that decide their cost of doing business. In-house regulatory and compliance teams can organise their telecom, media and energy matters client by client, alongside the rest of their litigation, the kind of client-wise workflow we cover for in-house teams in our piece on legal due diligence on the eCourtsIndia API.

Policy researchers and journalists tracing how a regulator’s orders fare on appeal can do it in one query, across years of matters. Students of telecom, media and energy law now have a clean, full-text dataset to study. And any business in these sectors can finally see where its own matter stands without logging into a separate tribunal portal. This is what we mean by putting the public record in a form a normal person can actually use.

Once you have found a TDSAT or APTEL matter, you do not need to keep checking it by hand. eCourtsIndia can track the case for Rs 5 a month and send a WhatsApp or email alert when a new order, listing or status change lands, at Rs 0.50 per alert, with an AI summary of any order for Rs 2 (see pricing). The same case opens on the Android app, the iOS app and through the eCourtsIndia Chrome extension, and if you need someone to appear for you, the verified advocate directory lists practitioners by court. Teams that follow hundreds of matters can pull the same records through the eCourtsIndia API (23 endpoints, Rs 200 of free credits on signup) or plug an AI assistant into the eCourtsIndia MCP server.

Staying on top of a TDSAT or APTEL matter

Regulatory appeals move slowly and then all at once. A tariff appeal can sit for months and then turn on a single hearing, so the useful habit is to set a watch rather than check by hand. Search the matter, add it to tracking, and let the alert tell you when the next order or listing appears. If you work across sectors, the same account covers the insolvency benches, the tax tribunals and the consumer commissions, so one dashboard holds every regulatory matter you follow.

The platform also keeps growing inward: order coverage on the tribunals already indexed keeps deepening, which widens what the full-text search can reach. Bookmark TDSAT search and APTEL search, and use the courts directory when you need a different forum.

Frequently Asked Questions