Bureaucratic Black Hole: Collapse of Citizen Grievance Systems Overloads India’s Courts, Worsening Access to Justice

Bureaucratic Black Hole: Collapse of Citizen Grievance Systems Overloads India’s Courts, Worsening Access to Justice

To ensure open access and academic traceability, the India Judicial Research Report 2025 has been archived on Zenodo.

By Rakesh Raman
New Delhi | November 4, 2025

New Delhi, November 4, 2025 — The latest edition of the India Judicial Research Report (IJRR) 2025 reveals that the crisis of judicial backlog and delay is being significantly compounded by the utter failure of government-run citizen grievance mechanisms, forcing millions of ordinary administrative disputes into the already collapsing court system.

The report, titled Law Flaw: Decline of the Indian Judiciary, dedicates a section to “Access to Justice & Citizen Grievance Mechanisms”, detailing how systems designed to provide administrative relief have instead become “little more than a perfunctory bureaucratic exercise,” escalating simple complaints into prolonged legal battles.

The Grievance Redress System is “Defunct”

The analysis identifies the Centralized Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System (CPGRAMS), the Government of India’s intended flagship initiative, as fundamentally defunct. CPGRAMS promised efficiency, transparency, and accountability but routinely fails on all fronts.

Key findings regarding CPGRAMS and state-level Public Grievance Monitoring Systems (PGMSs) include:

• Superficial Handling and Premature Closures: Complaints are frequently transferred randomly from one department to another without actual investigation or resolution. Bureaucrats often “close” cases without action, falsely claiming resolution.
• Opaque Outcomes: There is no independent audit to confirm whether grievances were genuinely resolved, leaving citizens helpless.
• Corrupt Officials: At the state level, PGMSs operate in name only, often involving corrupt officials themselves, which makes impartial redress impossible. Complaints are marked as “disposed of” with minimal follow-up, representing tokenism over substance.

This systemic failure means that citizens, facing administrative negligence, are reluctantly forced to file court cases as a last resort. The collapse of CPGRAMS and PGMS has therefore increased judicial pendency by converting routine administrative matters into full-blown litigations that drag on for years, sitting at the heart of India’s overall access to justice crisis.

About the India Judicial Research Report 2025

The India Judicial Research Report 2025 is the second comprehensive annual report in this series, following the 2024 edition. It was prepared by Rakesh Raman, a national award-winning journalist and the founder of RMN News Service and RMN Foundation.

The 2025 edition builds on the 2024 findings—which identified professional incompetence, systemic corruption, and technological backwardness as core weaknesses—by incorporating fresh evidence such as worsening pendency data and public controversies over judicial appointments. The report’s objectives are threefold: to quantify and contextualize the crisis, analyze root causes (from the opaque Collegium appointment process to the “bribe for bail” phenomenon), and offer a coherent set of politically and administratively feasible reforms.

The methodology synthesizes the author’s primary reporting, direct field experiences, official records like the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG), government reports, and recognized global indices such as the World Justice Project (WJP) and Transparency International.

For data analysis and narrative synthesis, the author incorporated Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, including Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) systems and Generative AI technologies. This integration adhered to recognized ethical frameworks, such as the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, ensuring that human judgment and editorial integrity remained central to the research process.

Global Access and Archiving on Zenodo

To ensure open access and academic traceability, the India Judicial Research Report 2025 has been archived on Zenodo. Zenodo is a global research repository developed under the European OpenAIRE program and operated by CERN.

The report can be freely accessed, downloaded, and cited using its permanent Digital Object Identifier (DOI) on the platform. This international archiving makes the IJRR 2025 accessible worldwide to researchers, policy analysts, and institutions, providing a verifiable reference for studies concerning judicial reform, corruption, and human rights in India.

By Rakesh Raman, who is a national award-winning journalist and social activist. He is the founder of a humanitarian organization RMN Foundation which is working in diverse areas to help the disadvantaged and distressed people in the society.

As a technology and AI expert, his professional focus is on applying emerging AI and digital technologies to enhance decision-making, operational efficiency, transparency, and democratic participation in governance, media, and business systems. You can click here to view his full profile.

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