India's Courts Are Doing More Than Adjudicating — They're Governing

From reasoning puzzles to heatwave response, Indian courts are increasingly fielding questions that reveal how badly the executive branch has abdicated its basic functions. That is the real crisis these rulings expose.

By Moemedi Michael Poncanasouth-asia5-minute read2 May 2026☆ Save ↗ Share ⎙ Print

When a Calcutta High Court judge spent time this week deliberating whether an exam question about counting circles should yield an answer of 14 or 8, something quietly shifted in the public imagination of what Indian courts are for. The aspiring candidate who filed the plea lost. The question remained 14. But the episode lingered as a symptom of something larger: the steady migration of problems that have no business before a bench onto a judge's desk anyway.

The pattern does not stop at competitive examinations. On the same day, the Andhra Pradesh High Court rejected a US-based man's request to appear virtually so that a court could help reconcile his marriage. The Supreme Court of India, also on 2 May 2026, prepared to hear a petition from the Trinamool Congress challenging an Election Commission directive on counting supervisors — a dispute rooted in West Bengal's contested electoral landscape. Meanwhile, opinion columns were already circulating on the heatwave crisis, arguing that India's policy apparatus lacks the vision to protect its citizens from lethal temperatures without judicial prodding.

India's courts are adjudicating less and governing more. That is not a crisis of the judiciary — it is a crisis of everything that sits before it.

The Petition Economy

Indian courts receive some 60,000 new cases each year at the Supreme Court level alone, with hundreds of thousands more working through the high courts and district benches. The conventional narrative frames this as a sign of social trust in the legal system. Courts are accessible, the reasoning goes, and citizens believe in their capacity to deliver justice. That reading captures something true. But it misses what is increasingly animating the petition economy: the private sector of governance has contracted so severely that litigants now treat courts as policy backstops.

The Andhra Pradesh marriage case illustrates this precisely. A man residing in the United States sought virtual court appearances for reconciliation proceedings — not a divorce, not custody, but reconciliation. Courts have long mediated family disputes, and rightly so. But what the petition implicitly asked was for the judiciary to perform a consular function, a family therapy function, and a logistical coordination function that executive agencies have not bothered to build. The High Court said no. But the fact that the petition was filed and took a judge's attention is itself a data point.

Judicial Policymaking Is Not New — But Its Scope Has Widened

India's Supreme Court has a documented history of what scholars call public interest litigation — broad standing rules that allow courts to take up systemic failures on behalf of citizens who cannot themselves litigate. This mechanism has produced landmark outcomes: prison reform orders, pollution directives, and directives on police conduct that the executive branch ignored for decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Court was filling a genuine vacuum.

What has changed is the category of vacuum. The heatwave opinion piece in The Indian Express on 2 May 2026 makes this explicit: India's disaster response architecture lacks a forward-looking thermal resilience strategy. When cyclones hit, there is some institutional memory. When heat kills — and it kills thousands annually — the policy response is largely reactive, localized, and underfunded. The argument is not that courts should set temperature thresholds. It is that the absence of executive vision is so chronic that petitioners are beginning to wonder whether courts might be the only institution capable of forcing the issue.

The Calcutta High Court reasoning question, though trivial in isolation, fits this pattern at its most absurd. Competitive exam disputes have a long history in Indian litigation — candidates challenge questions, answer keys, and marking schemes. The courts intervene, assess whether a question is genuinely ambiguous, and sometimes order re-evaluation. This is not inherently wrong. But when a judiciary is fielding complaints about whether a reasoning puzzle was fair, it is absorbing an administrative failure: the exam body's own grievance redressal mechanism was evidently not trusted.

The Trinamool Case and the Electoral Accountability Gap

The Supreme Court's scheduled hearing on the Trinamool Congress petition against the Election Commission's counting supervisor directive deserves separate attention, because it sits at the precise intersection of institutional failure and judicial remediation.

West Bengal's electoral politics have been turbulent since the 2021 assembly elections, with recurring disputes over the conduct of state elections and the independence of the Election Commission under the central government. The Trinamool Congress has alleged that the EC's directive on counting supervisors — presumably altering deployment or oversight arrangements — disadvantages its观察. The Commission, for its part, is acting within its statutory mandate.

The dispute is legitimate. Courts should adjudicate it. But the fact that a major political party in a state of 100 million people feels that its electoral rights can only be secured through Supreme Court intervention rather than through the Commission's own institutional safeguards points to a structural problem. The Election Commission is supposed to be a neutral constitutional body. When a party of government cannot trust its independence, and turns to the judiciary to referee the referee, the constitutional architecture is under strain in ways that litigation cannot permanently resolve.

What Courts Cannot Substitute For

The common thread running through these four disparate matters — a reasoning question, a heatwave policy gap, a virtual marriage reconciliation, and an electoral supervisory dispute — is that in each case, a court is being asked to compensate for an absent or insufficient executive function. That is not the judiciary's fault. Indian judges have shown considerable initiative in expanding access to justice. But courts decide cases; they do not run weather monitoring systems, they do not manage cross-border family logistics, they do not staff Election Commission field offices, and they do not write competitive examination guidelines.

The risk is not judicial overreach — it is executive underreach becoming permanent. When the petition economy normalizes, it entrenches a dynamic where courts are the default address for governance failures, relieving political pressure on the executive without actually solving the underlying problem. A Supreme Court order on counting supervisors helps Trinamool in one dispute. It does not repair the EC's perceived alignment. A bench directive on heatwave relief funding creates a precedent. It does not build the meteorological infrastructure or urban planning capacity that would make such directives unnecessary.

The real governance crisis in India is not that courts are too active. It is that the machinery that should make them less necessary has grown weak, slow, and unaccountable to the problems in front of it. Until that machinery is rebuilt — or built for the first time — the judiciary will keep getting petitions it should not have to answer, and citizens will keep waiting for an executive with vision in place of a bench with jurisdiction.