Establishing the baseline for the Kollam district court reform

by Siddarth Raman.

An important milestone in Indian legal system reform has been underway in Kollam district for the last year. The High Court of Kerala has launched a court for cheque dishonour cases under Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act as its first pilot in the 24×7 ONCourts initiative. PUCAR – of which XKDR Forum is a part – is a knowledge partner to the High Court of Kerala in this.

24×7 ONCourts aims to make the litigant experience efficient, predictable and seamless. Before assessing the intervention’s impact, we need a baseline. We estimate five measures of court performance using a random sample of 100 disposed cases filed in 2015-2024. In Kollam, the median case takes 609 days over 12 hearings. Only 19% of hearings are substantive. The first substantive hearing occurs after 240 days. The gap between hearings is 61 days. Stage-wise analysis shows that the most time is spent in getting the litigants to court, and most cases do not reach trial. We compute the same metrics for Thrissur to enable future difference-in-differences analysis.

Motivation

Changing a system is hard. Public policy interventions in India are often guided by conjecture, anecdote and assumption. Too many reforms fail because they are not grounded in data, and their outcomes are not measured. A data-driven process with clear hypotheses on the problem, the solution and the expected outcomes, backed by rigorous measurement and empirical evidence, is needed to distinguish success from failure.

Early in the 24×7 ONCourts journey, we planned for continuous assessment. The first step is to establish a baseline. It fixes the pre-intervention state so later changes can be attributed to the intervention rather than unrelated trends. Publishing a compact, replicable baseline also lets other researchers repeat the measurement after go-live and compare the site of implementation against unaffected locations.

Approach to measurement

Courts and court processes should be judged by their impact on litigants; they are the central stakeholders in the system. In this, there are two types of measures one can develop. There are coarse black-box metrics that give a broad picture of outcomes – like the time to disposal. Alongside this, there can be fine-grained process metrics like the time taken to make payments, extent of delay attributable to postal services or police processes, or the time taken by an accused person to file for bail. These are necessary for continuous improvement of processes. Existing court systems do not capture or publish this type of process data.

We use coarse metrics for our baseline, relying purely on public data, so that anyone can reproduce the numbers without privileged access to court systems. As courts modernize and publish more data in the public domain, we may be able to develop more sophisticated metrics.

Using this approach, we pick five measures of court performance:

1. Time to disposal is the number of days from filing to the court’s final order.
2. Hearings to disposal is the number of hearings a case goes through before it ends.
3. The share of substantive hearings is the fraction of hearings that move the case forward towards resolution. For instance, a hearing where the judge is on leave or a summons is re-issued is non-substantive; hearings where evidence is recorded or arguments are heard count as substantive.
4. Time to the first substantive hearing is the wait before meaningful progress begins.
5. Time between hearings is the within-case median gap between consecutive hearings. Lower the time, quicker the next hearing. The inter-quartile range (IQR) across cases is a measure of scheduling predictability. A lower IQR implies less variation in the time between hearings across cases.

A more detailed discussion of these measures and how to use them in evaluating court reforms is available here.

We conducted data collection and analysis in November 2024. Our approach, methodology and data are public, so that others can repeat the measurement for different samples, periods, or districts using e-Courts records.

Methodology

This article reports the pre-reform numerical values for Kollam, using a simple empirical strategy. We construct a baseline for Kollam before the 24×7 ONCourts intervention and compare it with Thrissur, which serves as the control district for future difference-in-differences analysis. We selected Thrissur as the control district after eliminating regions with existing special NI courts. Thrissur mirrors Kollam in judicial capacity (approx. 2,500-2,900 pending cases per judge), economic activity (GDVA per capita ratio of 0.9), and administrative composition (both have municipal corporations).

While Thrissur shares structural similarities with Kollam, direct cross-sectional comparisons of absolute performance levels between the two districts are methodologically unsound. Districts differ in idiosyncratic ways that are difficult to quantify -caseload volume, caseload mix, allocation rules. Consequently, our evaluation strategy avoids asking ‘Is Kollam faster than Thrissur?’ Instead, we focus on within-district changes over time.

We draw a random sample of 100 disposed Section 138 matters filed in 2015–2024 from Kollam and Thrissur using the public e-Courts database. Cheque dishonour cases are filed before the magistrate’s court. In Kerala, these are filed as private complaints (criminal miscellaneous petitions) before becoming criminal cases. For each case, we reconstruct the case lifecycle from hearing dates and order text, tagging hearings by stage and classifying them as substantive or non-substantive.

For the baseline, we report medians and means. Medians describe the typical case; means indicate the influence of long tails. By sampling only disposed cases, we measure the speed of the ‘successful’ cohort. We acknowledge this introduces survival bias: this metric underestimates the time for difficult cases still stuck in pendency. We aim to address this in future work by using survival analysis to estimate the time to disposal for ongoing cases.

Results

The tables below report the pre-reform baseline values for Kollam and, for comparison, Thrissur. They describe how long cases took, how many hearings they required, and how much of that time and effort was substantive.

1. Time to Disposal (days)

   District	Median	Mean
   Kollam	609	782
   Thrissur	792	1003

2. Hearings to disposal

   District	Median	Mean
   Kollam	12	15
   Thrissur	7	10

3. Share of Substantive Hearings

   District	Median	Mean
   Kollam	19%	26%
   Thrissur	25%	28%

   Note: The dataset spans 2015-2024; COVID-19 lockdowns (2020-2021) introduce exogenous shocks to the metric; it has not been adjusted for here.

4. Time to First Substantive Hearing

   District	Median	Mean
   Kollam	240	446
   Thrissur	276	447

   Note: Changes in procedure resulting from the shift from Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) to the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) may affect this metric.

5. Time Between Hearings

   District	Median	Mean	IQR
   Kollam	61	74	48
   Thrissur	123	121	62

Stage-wise Analysis

We analyse how time and hearings are distributed across case stages, as part of understanding the pre-reform baseline. In S138 cases, the case trajectory is:

• A complainant files a case.
• Post scrutiny and error correction, the case is registered as a miscellaneous petition.
• The judge takes cognizance and the case is now a criminal case.
• On cognizance, a summons is issued to the accused, followed by warrants and other methods to compel appearance of the accused.
• On appearance, the accused pleads not guilty and takes bail.
• Trial follows with evidence and arguments.
• The court delivers a judgement.

Not all cases go through all stages. For cases that reach each stage, we compute the median and mean time and hearings spent at that stage.

Kollam	Time		Hearings		Cases
	Median	Mean	Median	Mean
Filing – Registration	0	4	-	-	99*
Cognizance	149	268	2	4	63
Appearance	312	533	5	7	74
Trial	337	454	11	15	41
Judgement	27	38	1	1	100

Note: *An error on e-Courts for one case reports the registration before the filing, which has been excluded.

Thrissur	Time		Hearings		Cases
	Median	Mean	Median	Mean
Filing – Registration	0	1	-	-	100
Cognizance	235	317	2	2	52
Appearance	721	878	5	8	81
Trial	335	451	8	12	13
Judgement	42	69	1	1	100

In both districts, getting the litigants to court takes the most time. We also observe that most cases do not reach trial. This reaffirms earlier observations in other district courts.

Way Forward

24×7 ONCourts has been running for about a year. It is too early to compare outcomes – only a fifth of cases filed have been disposed. But this benchmark will enable comparison when the court reaches its full load. We aim to track the court through this journey and continue to share updates on the court’s performance.

We will continue to refine our methodology. The baseline analysis provides simple statistics from a set of 100 disposed cases. This suffers from the problem of censoring. We are only observing cases where the event of interest has occurred and we do not take into account ongoing cases. In systems like the court, where pendency is common, we should be using methods like survival analysis to account for ongoing cases. Other methods like time series analysis could identify trends. With Thrissur as a control, a difference-in-differences design can attribute average changes to the 24×7 ONCourts intervention. The present benchmark is the starting point; as post-intervention data accumulate, we can apply more demanding econometric checks using these tools.

Data and metrics form the backbone of evidence-based reform. The 24×7 ONCourts dashboard reports case statistics on a public dashboard in near real-time. This openness to measurement and public accountability sets a precedent for judicial reform initiatives across India. Public reporting supports continuous monitoring, mid-course correction and iterative refinement. A steady flow of transparent data, paired with simple, repeatable measures, is the practical route to learning what works.

References

24×7 ONCourts website.

Vision, ONCourts 24×7.

Evolution and Implementation of the 24×7 ONCourts: A Journey of Innovation Through Collaboration, PUCAR, 2024.

In Service of the Republic: The art and science of public policy, Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah, Penguin Allen Lane, 2022.

Approach to evaluate court reforms, Siddarth Raman, Seminar #9 of the series ‘Indian Legal System Reform’ by XKDR Forum, 2024.

Evaluating contract enforcement by courts in India: a litigant’s lens, Pavithra Manivannan, Susan Thomas, and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah, XKDR Working Paper No. 16, 2022.

How substantial are non-substantive hearings in Indian courts: some estimates from Bombay, Pavithra Manivannan, Karthik Suresh, Susan Thomas, and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah, The Leap Blog, 6 December 2023.

Get them to the court on time: bumps in the road to justice, Mugdha Mohapatra, Siddarth Raman, and Susan Thomas, The Leap Blog, 12 June 2025.

Understanding Judicial Delays in Debt Tribunals, Prasanth Regy and Shubho Roy, Working Paper 195, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, 2017.

Making courts transparent: What every litigant should know before filing a case, Pavithra Manivannan, Siddarth Raman, Gokul Sunoj, and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah, Bar and Bench, 2025.

A litigant’s guide to courts: How efficient is your court?, Pavithra Manivannan, Siddarth Raman, Gokul Sunoj, and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah, Bar and Bench, 2025.

A litigant’s guide to courts: Understanding predictability in India’s courts, Pavithra Manivannan, Siddarth Raman, Gokul Sunoj, and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah, Bar and Bench, 2025.

A litigant’s guide to courts: Towards a more measurable future, Pavithra Manivannan, Siddarth Raman, Gokul Sunoj, and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah, Bar and Bench, 2025.

The Long Road to Change, Ajay Shah and Amit Varma, Episode #36 of the podcast ‘Everything is Everything’, 1 March 2024.

Siddarth Raman is senior research lead at XKDR Forum. XKDR Forum is part of PUCAR – Public Collective for Avoidance and Resolution of Disputes. PUCAR is a knowledge partner to the High Court of Kerala in their 24×7 ONCourts initiative.

Source: https://blog.theleapjournal.org/2025/11/establishing-baseline-for-kollam.html