By Sanjay Raman Sinha
One of the more ambitious attempts to overhaul India’s troubled tribunal system, the Tribunal Reforms Bill, 2026, has been passed by Parliament amid Opposition protests and without substantive discussion. The Bill seeks to restructure tribunals, standardise their administration and address long-standing problems of vacancies, pendency, short tenures and financial dependence.
On paper, it is a significant institutional reform. Beneath the surface, however, the real story lies in the manner in which appointments, compensation, removals and funding have been designed. These are the levers that ultimately determine whether tribunals function as genuinely independent adjudicatory bodies—or become extensions of the executive machinery.
The Bill substantially reworks the Tribunal Reforms Bill, 2021, incorporating changes necessitated by the Supreme Court’s objections to earlier attempts at reform.
Its centrepiece is the proposed National Tribunals Commission (NTC), which is intended to oversee appointments and conditions of service across the tribunal system.
The idea of a single, independent body is itself significant. For years, tribunals have been criticised for being administered by the very ministries whose decisions they are required to scrutinise. The arrangement creates an obvious institutional conflict: the executive effectively controls the infrastructure and administration of bodies expected to adjudicate disputes involving the executive.
The NTC is intended to create a firewall against such interference. Yet, the extent of that firewall will depend on how much authority the government retains within the NTC.
The proposed NTC will consist of five members: a chairperson who must be a former Supreme Court judge or a former chief justice of a High Court; two judicial members drawn from serving or former High Court judges or chief justices; and two technical members with at least 25 years of experience in public administration, finance, accountancy or technology.
The NTC will oversee virtually the entire appointment cycle. It will conduct selections, review the performance of tribunal members, consider complaints against chairpersons and members, and maintain a National Tribunals Data Grid designed to place information on vacancies and pendency in the public domain.
For each vacancy, a search-cum-selection committee will recommend one candidate and one person on the waiting list. The government is required to make the appointment from the recommended candidate within three months.
This centralised mechanism could address one of the tribunal system’s most persistent weaknesses: fragmented recruitment. Instead of 16 separate, ministry-driven appointment processes, the Bill seeks to create a uniform system across 16 tribunals. If implemented faithfully, it could reduce vacancies, prevent arbitrary delays and make it more difficult to indulge in the kind of selective appointments or “cherry-picking” that the Supreme Court has repeatedly cautioned against.
But the composition and administration of the NTC raise an obvious question about executive influence.
The central government will appoint the chairperson and members of the NTC. Consultation with the chief justice of India (CJI) is mandatory for the chairperson and the two judicial members—but not for the technical members. That distinction is important.
“Consultation” has historically been one of the most contentious words in the debate over judicial appointments. The Second and Third Judges Cases transformed the meaning of consultation and ultimately established the principle of judicial primacy embodied in the Collegium system. In the tribunal context, however, the Bill gives the CJI a much narrower role: consultation is confined to three of the five members of the NTC.
The executive, therefore, retains substantial space to shape the institution that will, in turn, shape the tribunal system.
The potential for executive influence does not end with appointments. It also appears at the removal stage. The Bill lays down objective grounds such as insolvency and conflict of interest, but also permits removal for “incompetency” or “inefficiency”. These are inherently elastic expressions. Unless carefully defined and applied through transparent procedures, they can become vulnerable to arbitrary interpretation.
More troubling is the role assigned to the concerned ministry in the preliminary screening of complaints against tribunal members. Allowing the executive arm whose decisions may come before a tribunal to have an initial role in examining complaints against its members creates an obvious institutional tension.
The history of tribunal reform makes this particularly significant.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly objected to short and insecure tenures, striking down provisions relating to tribunal appointments and service conditions in 2021 and again in 2025. Security of tenure is not merely an employment benefit for a tribunal member; it is a condition of adjudicatory independence. A member who knows that continued service depends upon executive pleasure cannot be expected to function with complete institutional freedom.
The Bill, therefore, deserves scrutiny on another front: who controls the money? Under the proposed framework, salaries, allowances, service conditions and other compensation will continue to be determined by the government. The NTC Secretariat itself will be headed by a central government secretary.
That bureaucratic arrangement is significant. A commission designed to insulate tribunals from executive control will have its day-to-day administrative machinery headed by a senior government official. The government also retains control over the financial architecture, with the NTC’s budget flowing through normal governmental channels.
The Supreme Court has previously recognised that financial dependence can undermine institutional independence. A tribunal that lacks adequate funding, infrastructure or administrative autonomy cannot effectively deliver specialised and speedy justice, however independent its formal appointment mechanism may appear.
And the system badly needs that investment.
Chronic vacancies, inadequate infrastructure and enormous backlogs have crippled tribunals across the country. Bodies created to provide faster and more specialised adjudication have often ended up reproducing the very delays and procedural complexity they were designed to eliminate.
The proposed National Tribunals Data Grid could be a useful corrective. Publicly tracking vacancies and pendency would introduce an element of transparency that has long been missing. Centralised recruitment and a prescribed three-month deadline for government appointments could also make it easier to identify where the system is failing.
But deadlines on paper are not enough. India’s experience with judicial appointments demonstrates that statutory or administrative timelines do not necessarily translate into timely action. The credibility of the three-month appointment requirement will, therefore, depend not on its presence in the legislation, but on whether the executive actually honours it.
The Tribunal Reforms Bill, 2026 is, in many respects, more nuanced than earlier efforts. It recognises the structural weaknesses of the tribunal system and attempts to address them through a common institutional architecture rather than piecemeal ministry-by-ministry reform.
But institutional independence is ultimately tested not by the elegance of legislation, but by the restraints placed on those who administer it.
The Bill creates the appearance of an institutional firewall while leaving several important switches within government hands: appointments, technical membership, removal processes, service conditions, administrative staffing and finances.
That is the central paradox.
The government may have succeeded in creating a more coherent tribunal architecture. Whether it has created genuinely independent tribunals is another question altogether.
The litmus test of the new dispensation will, therefore, be simple: how freely will the government allow the institution it has created to function?
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