Independence On Paper, Control By Rule

Independence On Paper, Control By Rule

For nearly forty years, the Supreme Court has been trying to solve one structural problem: tribunals that adjudicate disputes against the government are administered by the very ministries they rule against. In Rojer Mathew (2019) and again in Madras Bar Association (2025), the Court ordered Parliament to create an independent National Tribunals Commission to fix this.

The Tribunal Reforms Bill 2026, passed this week, is that response - and whether it actually solves the problem is a genuine question, not a settled one.

The Case For Real Reform The

Bill does things Parliament has repeatedly refused to do before. It restores the five-year tenure for tribunal members that earlier executive rules had shortened and that courts kept striking down. It creates uniform service conditions across tribunals instead of leaving each ministry to set its own terms.

It builds a National Tribunals Data Grid for transparency and it does not disturb appointments already in the pipeline. Compared to the Finance Act 2017 and the Tribunals Reforms Ordinance 2021 - both of which the courts had to intervene against - this is Parliament finally legislating within the boundaries the judiciary drew, rather than testing how far it can push past them.

The Case For Skepticism

But look at who actually controls the NTC once it exists. Section 14 hands the qualifications, selection process and service conditions of tribunal members to executive rulemaking - the exact kind of delegation Justice Deepak Gupta's opinion in Rojer Mathew held could not be delegated, because deciding who is fit to exercise judicial power is a legislative function, not an administrative one.

Section 16 goes further: a ministry screens complaints before the NTC even hears them. And the Centre appoints the Commission's own members, consulting the Chief Justice only for the chairperson and judicial members. A body created specifically to take tribunal administration out of ministry hands is still, in its own formation and complaint-handling, answerable to those same hands.

Where the Real Question Sits

The genuine tension is not whether this Bill is better than what came before - it clearly is. It is whether "better" is the same as "independent." A commission whose members the executive appoints, whose complaint pipeline the executive screens and whose core service conditions the executive will write into future rules has not been freed from executive control - it has had that control formalised through a statute instead of an ordinance.

For an aspirant, the sharper GS2 question this raises isn't about tribunals specifically - it's about how often institutional reform in India satisfies the letter of a court's order while quietly preserving the substance of what the order was meant to end.