NEW DELHI: Significant discrepancies have emerged between case pendency data for the Armed Forces Tribunal tabled in Parliament and information obtained through a Right to Information request, raising questions about the accuracy of official statistics presented to lawmakers.
An RTI application filed in August 2025 by RTI activist and director, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, Venkatesh Nayak has revealed that the actual pendency of cases before the Armed Forces Tribunal stands at approximately 28,005 cases as of September 2025. This is substantially higher than figures suggested in recent parliamentary responses.
The data, obtained from the AFT's Principal Bench in Delhi, contradicts statistics presented by the Union Minister for Law and Justice in response to an unstarred question raised by DMK MP Arun Nehru from Perambalur, Tamil Nadu.
A media report based on the parliamentary data cited only 6,904 pending cases at the AFT. However, this figure represents only the pendency for 2025 and does not account for the cumulative backlog.
According to the comparative analysis, even the complete dataset tabled in Parliament for the years 2020-2025 shows lower pendency figures than the information provided directly by the tribunal under RTI.
The Armed Forces Tribunal, established under the Armed Forces Tribunal Act of 2007, adjudicates disputes relating to service matters and appeals from court martial proceedings for personnel of the Army, Navy and Air Force. The tribunal operates through a Principal Bench in Delhi and ten regional benches located in Chandigarh, Lucknow, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Jaipur, Guwahati, Kochi, Jabalpur and Jammu.
The RTI intervention sought detailed information about case admission, disposal and pendency across all AFT benches since inception, along with budget and expenditure data. The Central Public Information Officer of the Principal Bench provided statistics covering the period from 2009 to September 2025, offering a more comprehensive picture than the six-year snapshot presented in Parliament.
According to the RTI data, the AFT has admitted a total of 1,18,088 cases since 2009. Of these, 90,126 cases were disposed of by various benches, representing a disposal rate of 76.32 percent.
However, the analysis identified discrepancies in the disposal figures for the Chennai and Kochi benches between 2012-14, where the number of cases disposed exceeded the sum of pending cases from previous years and fresh admissions. After correcting for these anomalies, the actual disposal figure stands at 98,003 cases, leaving 28,005 cases pending.
The comparative analysis also highlighted year-wise variations between parliamentary data and AFT records. For 2020, the Law Ministry reported 2,460 cases disposed of by all benches, while AFT data showed only 1,939 disposals. Similarly, the Ministry claimed 6,140 disposals in 2021 against the tribunal's figure of 4,178.
The pattern of discrepancies continued through subsequent years, with the Ministry consistently reporting higher disposal figures except for 2024, when AFT's own records showed slightly higher disposals.
The Principal Bench accounts for nearly half of the current pendency at 48.01 percent, followed by the Chandigarh bench at 22.47 percent. The Jaipur and Lucknow benches each account for between seven and nine percent of pending cases, while the Guwahati bench has less than 0.5 percent pendency.
An analysis by Venkatesh Nayak attributes the increased backlog during 2020-21 partly to the existence of 23 vacancies across various AFT benches, as acknowledged by the government in Parliament in March 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic during this period would have further contributed to reduced case disposal rates.
The backlog has grown by nearly 50 percent over four years, from 18,829 cases in February 2021 to approximately 28,000 by September 2025. This increase occurred even as the tribunal's budget expanded significantly. Annual expenditure rose from Rs 20.68 crore in 2012-13 to Rs 48.22 crore in 2022-23. The budget estimate for 2023-24 stood at Rs 54 crore, rising to over Rs 56 crore for 2025-26.
Regarding expenditure, the AFT has more than doubled its annual spending from Rs. 20.68 crores in 2012-13 to Rs. 54.15 crores in 2023-24. The budget estimate for 2025-26 stands at Rs. 56.11 crores according to parliamentary documents. However, slight variations were noted between expenditure figures provided under RTI and those tabled in Parliament.
The simultaneous rise in both spending and pendency raises questions about the tribunal's operational capacity and whether resource allocation is addressing the core issues affecting case disposal.
While a pendency rate of less than 25 percent of total admitted cases is not considered alarming, the RTI applicant has sought further data on the duration of pendency from all benches to obtain a clearer picture of the backlog situation. Additional information is expected from regional benches following a first appeal filed against the partial denial of the original RTI request.
The findings raise concerns about consistency in official statistics and highlight the value of transparency mechanisms like the RTI Act in verifying government data presented to Parliament.
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