India’s state has often proved strikingly competent, from its ability to run vast elections to its timely response to natural disasters. It boasts many creditable institutions too, including the country’s central bank and its best universities. But more often than not, these are isolated examples of proficiency. India’s slow-moving legal system, by contrast, had thirty-three million pending cases, as the head of the Supreme Court complained in a tearful speech in 2016.47 At its current pace, another judge has suggested, the backlog would not be cleared for three centuries.
