A tribunal that stands on its own

Few questions in our public law have been revisited as often as the constitution of tribunals. Between SP Sampath Kumar in 1987 and the November 2025 decision in the Madras Bar Association line, courts had struck down statutes and found itself examining fresh legislation on the same grounds. That the matter had taken so many rounds shows how hard the problem had been. The Tribunals Reforms Bill, 2026, deserves attention because it seems to have identified the real problem and hopefully found answers as well.

Lesson From Elsewhere

Other countries had faced this problem, and their diagnosis is worth noting. When Sir Andrew Leggatt reviewed the field in the United Kingdom in 2001, he found more than seventy tribunals being administered by the very departments whose decisions they judged. He treated this as the central defect. His remedy was to take the tribunals away from their sponsoring departments and place their administration into a single service. That became the Act of 2007.


India came to tribunals early and, with success. The Income Tax Appellate Tribunal, set up in 1941, remains one of the finest examples of specialised adjudication. The model was carried further by Articles 323A and 323B and by the Administrative Tribunals Act, 1985, and then across the regulatory sectors, at a scale high courts could not have absorbed. Our problem was different. As the court observed in 2020, independence can be secured only when tribunals need not lean on the executive.

Reform has been attempted more than once. Much of the litigation was about whether the term should be three years, or four, or five, whether a minimum age of fifty wass permissible, and whether one name or a panel of two should be recommended. Tenure, age and the number of names are symptoms by which the disease is diagnosed. They are not the disease.

Root of The Matter

A tribunal must be a self-contained institution. It must have its own establishment, its own means of selecting those who man it, its own machinery for supervising them, and its own provision for premises, staff and funds. The new Bill answers the court on the points on which the court has spoken. It attempts to build an institution that makes those answers self-executing. A National Tribunals Commission is established by statute. It derives its existence, composition and functions from the Act and not from any executive order. It is charged with selection, oversight, discipline and the assessment of what tribunals require. Around it stands a permanent professional secretariat.

Checks That Make it Work

The Bill preserves judicial pre-eminence. The commission is headed by a retired judge of the Supreme Court or a chief justice of a high court and carries a judicial majority. Committees are judicially chaired, with the casting vote in the judicial chair. Selection, oversight and performance are led by the judicial element.

Pre-eminence is not the same as control. A system handed over wholly to the judicial side is also perceived with challenges. The Bill therefore places the tribunal at equi-distance from the executive and judiciary. The Central government prescribes the broad principles in the rules. The commission frames the regulations that govern how the work is done. The secretariat executes within that framework. It is guided on the manner of its functioning but not directed at the operational level. It draws its functions from the statute, not by delegation.

The result is a genuine system of checks and balances arising from the juxtaposition of the commission, secretariat and executive. The secretariat is bound by published regulations, and keeps a record of what it does. This is the delicate balance the Bill strikes. There is neither judicial interference in administration nor executive dependence. There is judicial pre-eminence in selection, supervision, discipline and performance.

Legislation of this kind should be judged not just by whether it survives the challenge but on whether it removes the conditions that produced the challenges. On that test, the Bill passes muster. If it works as designed, it will improve the tribunals system considerably. The litigant will find a forum that is properly constituted, adequately housed, promptly filled and answerable for its performance.

The author is Additional Solicitor General of India