The strength of the Supreme Court has reached 38 as the Center has appointed five new judges following the expansion of the benches | Today’s news
The Center on Monday announced the appointment of five new judges to the Supreme Court of India, taking the country’s top court to 38 (the Chief Justice plus 37 judges) from 34, according to a Union Law and Justice Ministry statement.
The newly announced judges are: Justice Sheel Nagu, Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court; Justice Shree Chandrashekhar, Chief Justice, Bombay High Court; Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva, Chief Justice of the Madhya Pradesh High Court; Justice Arun Palli, Chief Justice of the High Court of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh; and Senior Advocate Venkita Subramani Mohana.
Four of them were already high court judges, while Mohana became only the second woman ever to be appointed Supreme Court Justice straight from the bar. Previous Supreme Court appointees directly from the Bar include Justice Rohinton Nariman and former Chief Justice UU Lalit, both inducted in 2014.
The consecrated strength of the Supreme Court, including the Chief Justice, is now 38 judges, but one seat is still vacant. Before these appointments, the court worked with 32 judges and six vacancies. The last time the number of sanctions in the chamber of the Supreme Court, excluding the Chief Justice, was increased in 2019, from 30 to 33.
The new appointments come just days after the Union Cabinet approved an increase in the number of Supreme Court judges (excluding the Chief Justice) from 33 to 37 on May 6 to increase the efficiency of the apex court and ensure speedy justice to citizens.
Oldest pending case from 1986
Retired Supreme Court Justice Hemant Gupta said the expansion of the apex court in May followed by timely appointments will help clear more cases and reduce the court’s enormous workload and backlog.
“Often, cases are heard by larger benches – seven judges, nine judges. When there are larger benches, it reduces the number of judges available to hear other matters. For example, the judgment in the Sabarimala case took almost three weeks,” said Gupta, who also heads the central government’s Indian International Arbitration Center (IIAC) in New Delhi.
The judgment in the Sabarimala case refers to the 2018 Young Lawyers Association of India v State of Kerala in which a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court ruled by a 4-1 majority that women of all ages should be allowed to enter the Sabarimala temple.
According to the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG), a government-run portal, there are 92,249 cases pending before the Supreme Court, of which 35,808 (38%) are less than a year old. According to the NJDG, the oldest case still pending in the court dates back to 1986. India’s Supreme Court disposed of 56,342 cases in 2025, compared to 60,948 cases filed during the same period, the data shows.
But lawyers said the appointment was not just about reducing the high court’s backlog. “The real significance of these appointments is to strengthen the institutional capacity of the Supreme Court and its ability to effectively discharge its constitutional duties,” said Nikhil Jain, Honorary Secretary of the Supreme Court Advocates on Record Association (SCAORA), the representative body for advocates in the apex court.
