FEROZEPUR, PUNJAB — In 1997 a mother-and-son duo quietly “sold” an entire Indian Air-Force airstrip with forged deeds. Last week — twenty-seven Julys later — a court finally handed the runway back to the IAF. Netflix’s Scam 1992 suddenly looks like a short film.

At first glance it’s a toss-up which is funnier: an airstrip changing hands like a second-hand scooter, or a court needing twenty-seven Julys to notice. But the laughter curdles fast. Every extra summer on the docket hollows out governance, sours investors, and trains citizens to treat rules as optional. The longer justice naps, the easier it is for politics to turn predatory, for businesses to monetise loopholes, and for India’s global credibility to fray. Delay isn’t comic relief; it’s compound interest on dysfunction—paid in public trust.

The black comedy, of course, is the calendar. Former prime minister P. V. Narasimha Rao, mired in his own marathon bribery trial, once sighed to the bench: “The complainant is dead, the investigator is dead, even the first judge is dead — please deliver the judgment before I join them.” The line endures because the ailment endures.

A cellar of ever-ageing casks

India’s courts now juggle more than 52 million pending matters; a 2018 NITI Aayog study calculated that, at today’s pace, clearing the backlog would take three centuries. The Supreme Court alone hovers near 82,000 live cases.

And some files have ripened into museum pieces:

• Stamp-paper scam — unearthed 2001; sentencing dribbled out in 2018, a full year after Abdul Karim Telgi died in custody.
• Lalu Prasad Yadav’s fodder scam — exposed 1996; first conviction in 2013, yet 19 linked trials still lumber through Ranchi courts.
• Hashimpura massacre — the 1987 police killings finally produced life terms in 2018, 31 years and seven benches later.
• Bhopal gas tragedy — leak in 1984; the Supreme Court dismissed the last curative plea in March 2023, 39 years on.
• Priya Pillai “off-loading” — activist barred from a 2015 London flight; she won in court months after the conference lights were switched off.

Justice here can feel like an ageing uncle at a wedding: resplendent, respected, but arriving after the dessert has been cleared.

The rupee cost of a red-tape gavel

Delays are not just a nuisance; they bleed the economy. A seminal IndiaSpend/NIAS model found clogged dockets shave 0.5 percentage-points off GDP every year; newer academic work puts the drag closer to 1–2 points once stalled infrastructure and land disputes are counted. Contract enforcement still averages 1,445 days, keeping India at 163rd of 190 nations in the last World Bank Doing Business report.

Delayed litigation on highways, power plants and metros alone has swollen project cost-overruns past ₹5 lakh-crore. Rating agency Morningstar DBRS, while nudging India up to BBB this May, warned that “credible progress in dispute resolution” is essential for future upgrades — a polite way of saying investor patience is not infinite.

And then the human wreckage

Look at Bhopal: dependents of the dead have died pursuing compensation. In disproportionate-assets probes against politicians, witnesses age into silence or simply surrender to fatigue; evidence fades, documents vanish. Bank-fraud trials wobble because accused directors grow infirm, memories cloud and key signatories pass away. Cheque-bounce cases linger so long that small businesses fold before judgment; undertrials wait years, clogging jails meant for months. Delay is not an administrative hiccup — it is an accomplice that devalues evidence, corrodes public faith, and quietly writes off billions.

“Global Benchmarks: How Other Nations Deliver Justice”

Elsewhere, the queue is shorter and the bartender quicker. A small claim in England and Wales now reaches trial in about fifty weeks; even heavyweight multi-track suits average seventy-six weeks. Median time from filing to civil trial in U.S. federal courts is roughly 30 months. Singapore, which publishes its docket online in real time, cleared 95 percent of all civil and criminal matters last year. That is not a Rolex pace, but next to India’s three-digit timelines it feels Swiss.

“Systemic Causes of Delay in India’s Courts”

Too few judges (barely 21 per million people), labyrinthine procedure that allows adjournments to be traded like cricket cards, and a litigious government that files more than half of all civil appeals. Add creaking infrastructure — many district courts still lack reliable broadband — and even the ₹7,210-crore e-Courts Phase III digitisation project risks becoming merely a high-definition record of delay.

The closing argument

When an airstrip can slip off the defence balance-sheet and wander back only after twenty-seven years, what chance does an ordinary citizen have with a wage dispute or a bounced invoice? Justice delayed isn’t only denied; it de-rates growth, dents credit, scares capital and slowly strangles faith in the Republic.

The curtain is up, the audience restless, the stage crew jittery with coffee. The docket will not clear itself; appointments, procedural pruning and a throttle on state litigation must arrive — and on time. Otherwise, twenty-seven years from now, we may discover that the Rafales too have been sold, complete with forged RC books and a dusty file awaiting its day in court.