The Arithmetic Explained
Conciliation, mediation and settlement in a Lok Adalat follow the same modus operandi and yield the same result. To understand the arithmetic, the figures of any one of them will serve, and the Lok Adalat publishes its own most fully. Take the National Lok Adalat of 9 May 2026.
4.90 crore cases were taken up across the country and 3.91 crore were disposed of, with settlements totalling roughly Rs 17,300 crore[1]. Of those disposals, 3.37 crore were pre-litigation matters and 54.19 lakh were cases actually pending before courts. The proportion is not incidental. It is the pattern. Eighty-six of every hundred cases in the headline had never been part of the pendency at all: electricity and water dues, bank recovery notices, telephone and municipal demands, challans under the Motor Vehicles Act, and a large body of revenue work such as mutation, correction of the record of rights and boundary demarcation. These are collections and administrative entries, not disputes awaiting adjudication, and the departments concerned could have completed every one of them without a camp. Their scale confirms what they are: the pre-litigation cases account for 86 per cent of the disposals but only 42 per cent of the money, and the average settlement among them works out to about two thousand rupees.
The institution is therefore doing two different things and reporting one number. Some of it is genuine disposal of pending litigation. Most of it is the pre-emptive processing of grievances at a stage where no court was ever going to be troubled. Both may be useful. Only one of them answers the criticism the figure is deployed to answer.
The pending cases in that figure need a second look as well. Cases do not arrive at a National Lok Adalat by accident. They are identified in advance, screened for settlement potential and listed for the sitting. What is being counted, then, is a set of matters already selected because they were likely to end in compromise. A case fit for compromise is very often a case fit for decision, and one that would have been decided in the ordinary course had it not been held for the occasion of Lok Adalat, so it did not create the disposal. It collected disposals that were coming anyway, deferred them to a date on which they could be counted together, and then claimed the total. Some part of what is presented as relief to the docket is a rearrangement of the calendar.
Then there is the question of what the settled litigant received.
In a motor accident claim, the tribunal applies a formula. Multiplier, income, addition for future prospects, deduction for personal expenses, conventional heads[2]. The figure it produces is not a negotiating position. It is the claimant's legal entitlement. When that claimant accepts a lower figure across a table because the alternative is a decade of adjournments, the difference between the two amounts has a name. It is not a compromise but the price the system charges for its own delay and is paid by the widow.
The same arithmetic runs through the cheque dishonour docket, and there it can be stated exactly. The complainant is a person who has already been defrauded once. If he contests and succeeds, the Magistrate may impose a fine extending to twice the amount of the cheque, and the Supreme Court has directed that on conviction the fine should ordinarily be levied at a figure covering the cheque amount together with simple interest at nine per cent a year and paid over to him as compensation[3]. Take a cheque of one lakh dishonoured ten years ago. The interest alone is ninety thousand. His claim, if fought, is worth close to one lakh ninety thousand, and the statute permits up to two lakh. At the Lok Adalat the same case is settled, most often, at the amount written on the cheque, and sometimes at less than that. He recovers the sum he was owed a decade ago and nothing for the decade. He surrenders the whole of what the delay cost him, and he surrenders it to the party who caused the delay by defending. The defaulter, who has had the use of the money throughout, walks away having profitably purchased time.
And Who the Arithmetic Favours
Those are the two currencies in which the achievement is reported: cases disposed and money settled. What the tables do not record is which side conceded, and how much of its claim it gave up to close the file.
The answer is the same in every kind of case, because the person who comes to court is mostly the person who was wronged. The man who was struck. The man kept out of his share. The man handed a cheque that was never going to clear. The man who lost a limb, or lost whoever supported his family. The woman who has been asking for maintenance for years while the man who owes it takes date after date. Each came because they chose the lawful course, and because they expected the law to be firm with the man on the other side: the aggressor, the encroacher, or the opportunist who has worked out that delay costs him nothing. None came to be persuaded.
Take the criminal docket first. Two things are said to the complainant, and they are said together: the offence is a small one, and the case will take years. The second is what makes him agree. He can argue with the first, because a small matter is still his matter. He cannot argue with the calendar. And note what that second half is. It is not a reason to settle. It is the court telling him how badly it works and asking him to bear the cost. The offence has not grown smaller since the day he filed. Only the waiting has grown, and the waiting is not his doing.
The statute makes the same judgment, and makes it in writing. Voluntarily causing hurt is compoundable. Assault on a public servant discharging his duty is not. The act may be identical: a slap delivered to the clerk behind the counter is beyond compromise, while the same slap delivered to the man waiting in the queue outside will be settled. The answer, that the second provision protects the office rather than the person, is correct and is also the point. The office is placed beyond compromise because an assault upon it is treated as consequential, and the man in the queue is left to compromise because an assault upon him is not.
The civil docket does the same thing more quietly. A man is kept out of his share at a partition, files a suit, and is sent to mediation. Consider what has happened before a word is spoken there. His share is not a claim he is advancing; it is a right he already holds, and the people withholding it have no answer to it, which is why they withheld it rather than contested it. The reference gives them the answer they lacked. It turns his entitlement into a proposal and seats the man holding it opposite him as an equal, with something to concede and something to gain. He is asked what he will take. They are asked what they will give. He owned the whole of what is now being divided in that room. The obvious reply is that his share is disputed, and that a disputed claim is what mediation is for. But every civil suit is a disputed claim; that is what makes it a suit. Disagreement is not a reason to send a case away. It is the reason it came.
In motor accident claims and cheque dishonour cases, the party who comes willingly to the table is the one who owes. The insurer knows what the tribunal would award on the formula and knows it exceeds what will be signed today. The drawer knows that a decade of interest is about to be written off. Neither is under pressure. The pressure sits on the claimant, who has already waited years.
Think about what these men could have done instead. The one who was slapped could have slapped back. The one kept out of his land could have thrown the occupier out himself. That is what still happens in most of the country. Either way the matter would have ended there. They did not do that. They went to the police station, filed a case, paid a lawyer, and came to court for years. At the end they were told to take less than what was theirs or to compromise.
That is not to say the other way was better. A man who takes the law into his own hands has to answer for it. The point is simpler and worse. Following the law was made the slow and costly choice, and the loss that follows from that choice is counted as a success.
So the arithmetic runs one way in both currencies. A case in the disposal column closed, in the ordinary run, because someone accepted less than the law would have given him, and a rupee in the settlement column is smaller than the decree that was never passed. The party asked to accept less is the party who was wronged. The party who gains is the party who did the wrong, or who resisted paying for it.
Consent, Manufactured
The compulsion is not written down anywhere, so it has to be looked for in the room. Consent given to a party who controls the alternative is not really consent. The court is not a bystander offering a choice between a quick road and a slow one. It fixes the dates, grants the adjournments and decides how long the wait will be. When the same court tells the litigant he can avoid the wait by taking less, that is not an option, but quotation of a price.
And the word voluntary hides something else. The persuasion is not directed at the party at all. It is directed at his lawyer, the man who appears in that court every day, who has other matters listed before the same officer, and who will be there long after this case is closed. If he agrees, the client's consent is collected afterwards as a formality. If he does not, the case does not settle, whatever the client might have wanted. So the settlement is arrived at between the court and the bar, and the party whose right is being given up is told the outcome. None of this means the advice is wrong. Given the delay, a lawyer who advises his client to settle is very often advising him correctly. The objection is to who is being asked. He cannot judge the advice, because judging it means knowing what the case is worth if fought, and that is what he came to the lawyer for.
Nobody asks the obvious question for him: why should he take less because the court could not do its work in time?
Then the settlements are added up, the totals are announced and the photographs are taken.
Two people sign, and neither of them settled the terms. The terms were settled by the delay, and the delay is the court's. What is placed before the litigant is not an offer from the other side. It is the court's own inability, handed to him and priced. He takes it because the alternative is years more for the finality, and he may not live to see it, or may reach the end of it with nothing at all. This is called a dialogue.
National Legal Services Authority, Disposal of National Lok Adalat held on 09.05.2026 (All Types of Cases), recording 4,90,33,256 cases taken up and 3,91,30,051 disposed of, comprising 3,37,10,979 pre-litigation matters and 54,19,072 pending cases, with settlement amounts of Rs 73,04,56,90,006 and Rs 99,95,08,00,129 respectively. The table records that Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal held the sitting on 13 June 2026, Andaman and Nicobar and Telangana on 20 June 2026, and Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Karnataka on 11 July 2026. ↑
The heads applied are those settled in Sarla Verma v. Delhi Transport Corporation (2009) and National Insurance Co. Ltd. v. Pranay Sethi (2017). ↑
R. Vijayan v. Baby, (2012). The Court held that in all cases of conviction under Section 138, courts should uniformly levy fine up to twice the cheque amount, taking the cheque amount together with simple interest at nine per cent per annum as the reasonable measure of loss, and direct payment of that sum as compensation under Section 357(1)(b) of the Code of Criminal Procedure. ↑
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