Nearly 6 lakh cases pending in Assam's lower courts, Gauhati HC data shows

Assam's subordinate courts had 5,95,143 cases pending as of August 31, 2026, according to Gauhati High Court data reported by The Sentinel. Of these, 63,263 had been pending for more than five years.

Criminal matters dominate the backlog: 4,78,027 of the pending cases are criminal and 1,17,116 are civil, which means roughly four in every five cases waiting in the state's district and lower courts are criminal cases.

The High Court's own backlog

The Gauhati High Court, which serves Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and Nagaland, had 52,496 cases pending across its principal seat in Guwahati and its outlying benches on the same date. Of these, 17,523 were more than five years old.

By bench:

• Principal seat, Guwahati: 48,965 cases (35,794 civil, 13,171 criminal); 17,330 pending for over five years
• Itanagar bench: 2,072 cases
• Aizawl bench: 793 cases
• Kohima bench: 666 cases

Unlike the lower courts, the High Court's pending list is mostly civil: 38,438 civil cases against 14,058 criminal ones.

Reading the numbers

A few things stand out when the figures are set side by side:

• About 10.6% of the lower-court backlog (63,263 cases) is more than five years old.
• At the High Court level, the share of old cases is far higher: roughly one in three pending cases (17,523 of 52,496) has been waiting for more than five years.
• The principal seat in Guwahati carries about 93% of the High Court's total pending load, while the three outlying benches together account for 3,531 cases.
• Taken together, the subordinate courts and the High Court had more than 6.47 lakh cases pending on August 31.

Subordinate courts here means the district and sessions courts, civil courts and magistrates' courts under the High Court's supervision, where most cases in the state begin.

Why it matters

Long pendency in criminal courts often means undertrial prisoners spend extended periods in jail, while witnesses move away and evidence weakens with time. Civil cases, from land disputes to recovery suits, can take years to reach a decree.

Courts across the country use Lok Adalats, plea bargaining in eligible criminal cases and special drives on old cases to bring pendency down, and court-wise live figures are published on the National Judicial Data Grid (njdg.ecourts.gov.in).

The figures are a snapshot of the courts' own data as of August 31; pendency changes month to month as new cases are filed and old ones are disposed of.