Tribunalisation Of Justice: Assessing The Relevance And Challenges Of The Central Administrative Tribunal In India
Mr. Vivek Pandey, LLM Scholar, Maharashtra National Law University, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar
ABSTRACT
When India introduced the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) under Article 323A, the idea was simple and appealing: give government employees a faster, specialised forum for service disputes, and ease the burden on overcrowded High Courts. This seminar paper asks whether CAT has actually delivered on that promise. Using a doctrinal and analytical approach, it begins with the story of how tribunalisation took shape, from the pre-constitutional period through the Swaran Singh Committee and the Forty-Second Amendment, and then explains how CAT is built, what it can decide, who sits on it and how it works.
The paper then follows the Supreme Court’s long and often uneasy dialogue with the tribunal system. Starting with S.P. Sampath Kumar and R.K. Jain, it moves through L. Chandra Kumar, R. Gandhi, the National Tax Tribunal case, Rojer Mathew and the Madras Bar Association cases, up to the ongoing challenge to the Tribunals Reforms Act, 2021. Against this backdrop, it takes an honest look at how CAT functions on the ground: executive influence over appointments and tenure, long-standing vacancies, a backlog of 80,545 pending cases as on 31 December 2022, weak infrastructure, inconsistent rulings and the rising cost of access for ordinary litigants.
The paper concludes that CAT is constitutionally valid and still needed, but its independence is compromised by executive control, and the High Court review mandated after L. Chandra Kumar has added another layer of litigation that undercuts its efficiency. To restore its purpose, the paper suggests a fixed five-year tenure, a judicially led selection process, an independent National Tribunals Commission, time-bound filling of vacancies, completion of the Judicial Impact Assessment and greater consistency in precedent.
Keywords: Tribunalisation, Central Administrative Tribunal, Article 323A, Judicial Independence, L. Chandra Kumar, Tribunals Reforms Act 2021.
