Authors : Pratishtha Rajiv Bajaj (pratishtharajbajaj@gmail.com) & Bharat Chugh

---

The NEET-UG paper leak, and the march it drew from Jantar Mantar to the gates of Parliament, led the government to its safest and most familiar defence mechanism and response : announcing a fast-track court to try those accused.

Soon thereafter, the Delhi High Court designated a Special Judge at Rouse Avenue the same evening, reinforcing precisely why the fast-track court is the most reached-for instrument in Indian criminal justice policy : It can be announced on a Thursday and exist by Friday.

And in a narrow sense, it does work. These courts are measurably faster than regular courts on the specific set of cases assigned to them. But a court does not exist for one kind of case. It exists for all of them. One case’s fast-tracking is another’s slow-tracking; one’s prioritisation is another’s deprioritisation.

Fast Track Courts have been around. Twenty-six years, two national schemes, but no dent in the overall backlog. The reason is simple.

A fast-track court typically creates no additional judge and no additional capacity as the presiding judge is drawn from the existing system. She either keeps her old docket and carries the fast-track cases on top of it, or she is moved off it to take up the new one. In the first case, her old matters wait longer; in the second, they wait for someone else. There is no version of this where nobody waits longer. Which is exactly what the system should do. All cases are equal and no cases are (and should be) more equal than the others.

The same arithmetic governs everything else a trial needs. In Delhi it is not unusual for a single public prosecutor to appear before several courts in a day; assigning him to the fast-track court does not produce a second prosecutor, it means another courtroom waited for him. The 2019 scheme supplied courts without the machinery to feed them, and that machinery was never multiplied – only redirected.

Even the favoured category does not escape this. The Fast Track Special Courts constituted in 2019 to try rape and POCSO cases were carrying close to 2.45 lakh pending matters at the end of 2025, and that year alone saw new filings outnumber disposals by more than two to one. A court that is designated but not resourced does not dissolve a queue – it grows one of its own, then joins the competition for the same judges it was carved out of.

Nor is the queue reordered once. It is reordered every time a new category is pushed to the front, and each new front pushes the last one back – and not by gravity of offence. Sexual assault, POCSO, SC/ST atrocities, terrorism, corruption by MPs and MLAs: each has been given a fast track.

Murder has not.

Nor has acid attack, cyber fraud, or the execution of a decree a litigant won years ago.

The case for each is no weaker; priority, in practice, is decided – unfortunately – by whichever cause can put people on the street. Paper-leak aspirants marched on Parliament and were met with batons, and got a court overnight. Acid-attack victims do not march. Cyber-fraud complainants do not march. Of the tens of thousands of criminal cases in the district courts older than thirty years, not one was ever loud enough to be fast-tracked.

The people moved to the back of that queue are undertrials whose liberty is the thing being postponed. When a judge is reassigned, a bail application is not heard this week, a trial date slips by three months, a man who may well be acquitted spends another season in custody. He has no category, no scheme, and nobody marching for him.

The objection is not administrative but constitutional. If a speedy trial is a right under Article 21, it belongs to every litigant equally; ranking claims to it is not case management but preference. Article 14 makes the same point from the other side: classification must rest on something rational, and the Supreme Court held in Anwar Ali Sarkar that the desire for a speedier trial is not that thing. A litigant whose matter has waited a decade has the same claim on the court’s time as one whose matter is three months old and on the front page.

Which is why the instrument keeps getting reached for. Reordering a queue is free. Adding to it costs money, posts, buildings, and years – and produces nothing announceable while the protest is still on the news.

A designation can be notified the same week; a sanctioned court cannot.

So the ask is narrow: sanction the post instead of renaming the court, because a second docket is not a second judge. Until that happens, what is being offered is not speed at all – it is the same speed, taken from somewhere quieter.

None of this is an argument against speed. It is an argument against buying it on credit from someone else’s case.