CAT Case Status on eCourtsIndia: Search Every Central Administrative Tribunal Bench

The Central Administrative Tribunal is now live on eCourtsIndia, so you can search every CAT bench, from the Principal Bench in New Delhi to Srinagar, Ernakulam and Cuttack, in the same place you already search the Supreme Court, the High Courts and the district courts. The platform indexes 192,208 CAT matters across 19 benches, verified on 17 July 2026, and each record carries the case history and, where uploaded, the order or judgment text. You can open any bench with a single link, search by the employee name, the department or the CNR, and the free text box reaches inside the record, not just the header. This guide explains what just went live and exactly how to check a CAT case status in one step.

Key takeaways

• The Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) is now searchable on ecourtsindia.com/search, across all 19 benches, holding 192,208 matters of which 136,999 are disposed and 55,209 are pending.
• CAT is the specialist forum for the service disputes of central government employees, set up under the Administrative Tribunals Act, 1985.
• Every bench opens with a single cc= link, from the Principal Bench in New Delhi, the largest with more than 31,000 matters, to the benches at Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad and beyond.
• The core record is the Original Application (OA), the service petition an employee files, at 77,555 matters, sitting alongside 77,322 miscellaneous applications and 24,504 contempt petitions.
• You can search by party name, by CNR, or by bench then filter, then read the actual orders, with no login and no paid ranking.

What just went live on eCourtsIndia

We have added the Central Administrative Tribunal to the eCourtsIndia index. That means the forum that decides the service life of the central government workforce, promotions, pensions, transfers, seniority and disciplinary action, now sits alongside the courts and tribunals you could already search. CAT is one of the largest tribunal datasets on the platform, and it is the natural companion to the service and pension forums we have already brought online.

This continues our tribunal rollout. CAT joins the Armed Forces Tribunal launch, which handles the service matters of defence personnel, and the Railway Claims Tribunal launch, and follows the company law, tax, securities and consumer forums we have worked through over the past months. If you have ever tried to follow a service matter across the separate CAT bench portals, you know the records are hard to read together. eCourtsIndia stitches all 19 benches into one searchable index.

What the Central Administrative Tribunal is

The Central Administrative Tribunal is the specialist forum that hears service disputes of people employed by the central government, and it takes the place of the High Court for most of those matters. It was set up under the Administrative Tribunals Act, 1985, which was passed to give central government employees a dedicated, faster forum for their service grievances and to ease the writ burden on the High Courts. A central government servant who is aggrieved by a decision on recruitment, promotion, seniority, transfer, pay, pension or discipline files an Original Application before the CAT bench that has territorial jurisdiction over the posting.

CAT is arranged as a Principal Bench in New Delhi and a set of benches across the country, each covering a region. An order of CAT is not appealed to a higher tribunal in the ordinary way. Instead it is challenged before a Division Bench of the High Court that has jurisdiction over that bench, following the Supreme Court’s decision in L. Chandra Kumar. In plain terms, if you work for the central government or a body that CAT covers and you have a service grievance, CAT is usually your first court, and the data on eCourtsIndia now lets you follow that matter from filing to order.

Open your CAT bench

The fastest way into the data is by bench. Each bench has its own set of court codes, and the table below maps every bench to a one click link that opens its records on eCourtsIndia. To open every bench together, use the full CAT search.

Bench	State or UT	Open on eCourtsIndia
Principal Bench, New Delhi	Delhi	Open Delhi Principal Bench
Ahmedabad	Gujarat	Open Ahmedabad Bench
Allahabad	Uttar Pradesh	Open Allahabad Bench
Bangalore	Karnataka	Open Bangalore Bench
Chandigarh	Chandigarh	Open Chandigarh Bench
Chennai	Tamil Nadu	Open Chennai Bench
Cuttack	Odisha	Open Cuttack Bench
Ernakulam	Kerala	Open Ernakulam Bench
Guwahati	Assam	Open Guwahati Bench
Hyderabad	Telangana	Open Hyderabad Bench
Jabalpur	Madhya Pradesh	Open Jabalpur Bench
Jaipur	Rajasthan	Open Jaipur Bench
Jammu	Jammu and Kashmir	Open Jammu Bench
Jodhpur	Rajasthan	Open Jodhpur Bench
Kolkata	West Bengal	Open Kolkata Bench
Lucknow	Uttar Pradesh	Open Lucknow Bench
Mumbai	Maharashtra	Open Mumbai Bench
Patna	Bihar	Open Patna Bench
Srinagar	Jammu and Kashmir	Open Srinagar Bench

How to check a CAT case status

To check a CAT case status, open eCourtsIndia search, filter to the right bench, then search by the employee or department name or the CNR. There are three reliable routes, depending on what you already know.

1. By party name. If you know the applicant or the department, type the name into the free text box and add the bench filter. The index matches names on both sides, so it works whether your name is the applicant or the respondent, and the respondent is usually the Union of India through a ministry, department or public body. 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 CAT matter carries a 16 character CNR that never changes, even if the case is transferred or renumbered. The CNR begins with the bench and register code, so a Delhi Original Application starts with CGADLOA and a Mumbai one with CGAMUOA, 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.

3. By bench, then filter. If you want to browse rather than look up one matter, open a bench with its cc= link and use the sidebar to narrow by case type, status and filing year. This is the route a service law advocate or a department’s establishment section takes when scanning every pending Original Application at a bench. For the full set of filters, parameters and query operators behind all of this, our eCourtsIndia search guide is the reference to keep open in another tab.

The CAT case types you will see

CAT uses a small, consistent vocabulary of case types, and knowing the main ones makes a search far quicker. The table below shows the verified counts across all 19 benches.

Case type	What it is	Indexed matters
Original Application (OA)	The core service petition an employee files against a government decision	77,555
Miscellaneous Application (MA)	Applications filed inside a matter, such as a stay, early hearing or condonation of delay	77,322
Contempt Petition (CP)	Action for disobedience of a CAT order that a department has not implemented	24,504
Review Application (RA)	A request to review a CAT order	7,071
Transfer Application (TA)	A matter transferred to CAT or moved between benches	3,134

The shape of this caseload tells a real story. The Original Application and the Miscellaneous Application run almost neck and neck, because every service petition tends to draw a cluster of interim applications around it. The 24,504 contempt petitions are the number worth pausing on, because they show how often a government employee, having won a promotion or a pension order, has to come back to court to make the department actually comply. To make sense of where any of these stand, the case status dictionary explains every status code in plain English, and the case type encyclopedia covers the vocabulary across every court.

Reading orders and judgments

Search is only the first step. Once you are on a case, eCourtsIndia gives you the case history and, where it has been uploaded, the full text of the order or judgment. For a service matter, where the ratio on a seniority rule or a pension entitlement can decide thousands of similar cases, that full text access is the difference between knowing a matter 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 rule, office memorandum or line of reasoning appears, which is exactly how a service law practitioner or an establishment officer builds a position. The same portfolio style view, following a department or an issue across many cases at once, is the 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 the ones who live in service law. A central government employee tracking an own promotion or pension matter, and the service law advocate acting for them, can now follow it from one screen instead of a bench portal. Establishment and vigilance sections inside ministries and public bodies can watch every matter filed against their department, and see how similar grievances have been decided elsewhere. Recognised service associations and unions can track the litigation that shapes the careers of their members.

Beyond the direct participants, researchers studying how the tribunal system has performed since 1985, and journalists tracing high profile service and transfer disputes, now have a clean, national dataset to work from. Anyone advising on a service rule can read how CAT has actually treated it across benches, rather than guessing from a single reported case. This is what we mean by putting the public record in a form a normal person can actually use.

What comes next

The Central Administrative Tribunal is now part of the index, alongside the Armed Forces Tribunal, the Railway Claims Tribunal, the company law and tax benches, the debt recovery tribunals 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, and to deepen the order coverage on the benches already live. Each one gets the same treatment, one searchable index, full text orders where available, and no paywall on the public record. Bookmark the search and check back as each one goes live.

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