3,000 Cases, Six Months, One Member - Is the PMLA Tribunal Actually Deciding Anything?

When a Tribunal Has Six Months and Three Thousand Files Picture the

arithmetic first. One Adjudicating Authority. Roughly 3,000 cases. Six months, by law, to decide each one - because the statute treats delay itself as dangerous to enforcement. Justice Joymalya Bagchi put the real question to the Enforcement Directorate's counsel without softening it: will there be actual application of mind in that scenario, "or just signing on dotted lines"?

The Number That Changes the Stakes

The petitioners' strongest fact is not abstract. Of 8,851 cases the ED initiated in a given period, only 60 went to trial. Yet attachment - freezing someone's property, often for years - applies the moment the case is initiated, trial or no trial.

That means for the vast majority of people caught in this net, the Adjudicating Authority's confirmation is not a formality on the way to a "real" hearing. It is, for years at a stretch, the only meaningful review their property rights will get.

What the Law Actually Promises Section 6 of the

PMLA envisages a three-member Authority, with a judicial member as a structural safeguard - someone trained to test evidence, not just process paperwork. The Supreme Court leaned on exactly this safeguard in 2022 when it upheld the PMLA's otherwise stringent, low-threshold powers of arrest and attachment.

If that safeguard now functions as a single, non-judicial member working through a caseload that size, the constitutional bargain the Court accepted in 2022 quietly changes without anyone amending the law.

Efficiency Is Not the Enemy

• Emptiness Is Nobody disputes that money-laundering enforcement needs speed; assets can be moved or dissipated quickly and a slow tribunal helps nobody. The problem is not the 180-day deadline itself. The problem is what happens when a genuine quasi-judicial exercise - weighing evidence, applying legal tests, deciding whether the law's own conditions are met - gets compressed until the deadline is met but the judgment behind it is not. A stamp and a judgment look identical on paper. They are not identical in what they do to the person whose assets are frozen.

The Honest Middle Ground The Court is not

being asked to abolish the 180-day rule and it should not be. It is being asked whether an institution can meet a hard deadline without being a fair institution - whether speed and scrutiny can survive in the same tribunal at the same time or whether one is quietly eating the other.

Filling the judicial-member vacancies the Act already contemplates and adding capacity rather than compressing standards, is the difference between a tribunal that decides quickly and one that merely disposes quickly.