AFT Case Status on eCourtsIndia: Search Every Armed Forces Tribunal Bench

The Armed Forces Tribunal is now live on eCourtsIndia, so you can search the Principal Bench in New Delhi and every regional bench from one place, by name, CNR, case type or location. The platform indexes more than 40,000 decided service matters, and each one carries the full judgment text, so you can read how the tribunal actually decided a pension, disability or promotion dispute. You can open any bench with a single link, and the free text box reaches inside the judgment text, not just the header. This guide explains what just went live and exactly how to check an AFT case status in one step.

Key takeaways

• The Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT) is now searchable on ecourtsindia.com/search, across the Principal Bench and the regional benches.
• AFT is the court for the service matters of soldiers, sailors and airmen, set up under the Armed Forces Tribunal Act, 2007.
• More than 40,000 decided matters are indexed, each carrying the full judgment text.
• The most common subjects are pension and retirement benefits, disability pension, and promotion, rank and seniority, usually with the Union of India as respondent.
• Every record is free to search, with no login and no paid ranking, the same public record principle behind every other court on the platform.

What just went live on eCourtsIndia

We have added the Armed Forces Tribunal to the eCourtsIndia index. The forum that decides the service disputes of serving personnel and veterans now sits alongside the Supreme Court, the High Courts, the district courts and the tribunals you could already search. This is the latest step in a series of tribunal additions. We have been working through India’s specialist forum map one court at a time, from the company law benches in our NCLT and NCLAT launch to the environmental court in our NGT launch. The AFT matters because it touches a group that ordinary legal databases almost always miss, the men and women of the armed forces and their families, whose pension, disability and service claims run into the tens of thousands.

The AFT collection here is deep and, importantly, decided. The matters indexed are disposed, and because the tribunal issues reasoned judgments, the judgment text is attached. That means a veteran, a serving officer or their lawyer can read how the tribunal has treated a claim just like theirs, rather than starting from scratch.

What the Armed Forces Tribunal is

The Armed Forces Tribunal is the special court that decides service and disciplinary disputes of personnel governed by the Army, Navy and Air Force Acts, and hears appeals against court martial verdicts. It was created under the Armed Forces Tribunal Act, 2007. Its work splits into two halves. On the service side it decides original applications about pay, pension, disability benefits, promotion, seniority and conditions of service. On the disciplinary side it hears appeals against the findings and sentences of courts martial. The respondent is almost always the Union of India and the defence establishment.

The AFT sits as a Principal Bench in New Delhi and a set of regional benches across the country. The platform indexes all of them together, so whether a matter was decided in Chandigarh, Kochi or Guwahati, it shows up in the same search.

Every AFT bench on eCourtsIndia

The fastest way into the data is by bench. Each bench has its own court code, and you can drop one into a cc= search link to see every indexed matter for that bench in a single view. To open all benches together, use the full AFT search. The table below lists every bench with a direct link.

Bench	Open on eCourtsIndia
Principal Bench, New Delhi	Open Principal Bench
Chandigarh	Open Chandigarh Bench
Lucknow	Open Lucknow Bench
Kolkata	Open Kolkata Bench
Guwahati	Open Guwahati Bench
Jaipur	Open Jaipur Bench
Jabalpur	Open Jabalpur Bench
Kochi	Open Kochi Bench
Mumbai	Open Mumbai Bench
Chennai	Open Chennai Bench
Srinagar	Open Srinagar Bench

How to check an AFT case status

To check an AFT case status, open eCourtsIndia search, filter to the right bench using its court code, then search by the name or the CNR. There are three reliable routes, depending on what you already know.

1. By name. If you know the applicant, type the name into the free text box and add the bench filter. Personnel are often listed with rank and service number, so a surname plus the bench usually finds the matter. To trace a name across every bench at once, drop the bench filter and search the name alone.

2. By CNR. Every AFT matter carries a 16 character CNR that never changes, even if the case is renumbered. An AFT CNR begins with the bench code, followed by the case type letters, the running number and the year. Paste the CNR into the search and you land on that exact matter. If you are not sure how to read the code, our guide on the CNR number decoded walks through each character.

3. By bench, then filter. If you want to browse rather than look up one matter, open a bench with its link and use the sidebar to narrow by case type, status and filing year. This is the route a lawyer or a researcher takes when scanning all the matters of a particular kind, say disability pension claims at one bench. For a complete tour of the filters and query operators, our eCourtsIndia search guide is the reference to keep open in another tab, and the litigant search guide is the route for tracing one name across every bench at once.

The AFT matters you will see

The AFT record is built around service claims, and a few subjects dominate. The table below lists the main ones you will meet.

Matter type	What it is
Original Application, service matters	The core claim on pay, pension, benefits or conditions of service, the most common kind of matter
Pension and retirement benefits	Claims about grant of pension, family pension and other retirement dues, a very large share of the docket
Disability pension	Claims for disability pension by personnel invalided out or injured in service
Promotion, rank and seniority	Disputes over selection, promotion and grant of substantive rank
Appeal against court martial	Challenges to the findings and sentences of a court martial

The pattern is telling. Pension, disability and promotion claims fill most of the docket, which is why full text access matters so much here. For the full vocabulary across every court, see our case type encyclopedia, and to make sense of where a matter stands, the case status dictionary explains every status code in plain English.

Reading orders and judgments

Search is only the first step. Once you are on a case, eCourtsIndia gives you the case record and the full text of the tribunal’s judgment where it has been uploaded. Because the AFT matters indexed here are decided, that judgment text is attached to the record, and it is what makes this collection so useful. For a service dispute, where the finding on entitlement, the rate of disability pension or the reading of a service rule is the whole point, 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 judgment text, so you can find every matter where a particular rule, benefit or kind of claim comes up. That portfolio style view, following an issue across many cases at once, is the same workflow we cover for legal teams in our piece on legal due diligence on the eCourtsIndia API.

Who this helps

The people who will feel this addition first are veterans, serving personnel and the lawyers who act for them. A veteran chasing a disability pension can read how the tribunal decided identical claims. A lawyer preparing a promotion or seniority matter can pull every relevant judgment before filing. Ex-servicemen’s associations that help members with their dues can point to the ruling that fits.

On the other side, the defence establishment and its legal branches can see how a line of claims has been decided across benches. Researchers studying military service law, and journalists covering how the country treats its soldiers after service, now have a clean, full text dataset to work from. This is what we mean by putting the public record in a form a normal person can actually use.

What comes next

The Armed Forces Tribunal is now part of the index, alongside the company law benches, the tax tribunals, the debt recovery tribunals, the environmental court and the consumer commissions we have already added. We are continuing to bring the rest of India’s tribunals onto eCourtsIndia in the weeks ahead. Each one gets the same treatment, one searchable index, full text orders and judgments where available, and no paywall on the public record. Bookmark the search and check back as each one goes live.

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