The Commission the Court Kept Asking For: Does the NTC Finally Free India's Tribunals?

The Silence in Article

323A That Took Four Decades to Fill Article 323A allows Parliament to set up administrative tribunals to decide service disputes of public servants. Article 323B allows Parliament and state legislatures to create tribunals for other subjects, such as taxation and industrial disputes.

Both provisions say who may create a tribunal. Neither says who should appoint its members, fix their tenure or control their administration. That silence, left in the text by the 42nd Amendment of 1976, is why the Supreme Court and the Union government have argued over tribunals ever since.

The

Rule as Written, the Rule as Practised In practice, ministries filled the gap. Tribunal members were selected, renewed and serviced by the very departments whose decisions they were meant to review. A tax tribunal could depend on the Finance Ministry for its members' continuation and a service tribunal on the government it ruled against.

The Court treated this as a problem of judicial independence, linked to Article 50, the directive that the State should separate the judiciary from the executive. In L. Chandra Kumar (1997), it held that tribunals could not displace High Court judicial review.

In Union of India v. R. Gandhi (2010), it held that a tribunal taking over a court's work must carry the same independence as the court it replaces. In Rojer Mathew (2019), it struck down executive-designed tribunal rules and recommended a single independent oversight body.

In Madras Bar Association (2025), it struck down provisions of the 2021 Act on tenure and age limits and directed that an independent National Tribunals Commission be created. Each time, the executive passed a new law or rule and each time the Court found that the core problem remained.

What the 2026 Rules Change

The new framework finally fills the gap with an institution. A five-member National Tribunals Commission, headed by a retired Supreme Court judge or High Court Chief Justice, with two judicial and two technical members, will select chairpersons and members for 16 tribunals.

Selection must begin six months before a vacancy arises, which attacks the chronic problem of empty benches. Eligibility, pay, service conditions and a misconduct inquiry mechanism are standardised across tribunals.

The Test That Remains Look at

who issued the rules: the Union Law Ministry. The Commission chooses the members, but the executive has written the rules on qualification, conditions of service and the inquiry process. Whether the Commission's budget and staff are independent of the ministry is not yet visible from what has been notified.

For the exam: the strongest tribunal answers do not stop at "an independent commission now exists". They name the constitutional silence in Articles 323A and 323B, trace the cases that filled it and then ask what independence still depends on.