Pune District Court: 26 Judges, 102,557 Cases Audited

# Pune District Court: 26 Judges, 102,557 Cases Audited This report is produced by Judge My Lawyer, India's legal analytics platform, based on an analysis of 102,557 cases filed before the District and Sessions Court, Pune, Maharashtra. Case-level data was sourced directly from the court's publicly accessible case management portal. The analysis covers 26 active benches, records dating from February 2005 to April 2026, with case types spanning criminal bail applications, sessions trials, motor accident compensation claims, civil miscellaneous appeals, and Darkhast (decree execution) proceedings.

The Backlog Behind the Numbers

India's Code of Criminal Procedure expects sessions trials to conclude within 60 days of framing charges. There is no comparable hard statute for civil appeals or decree execution proceedings, but the Supreme Court has issued repeated directions for district courts to clear backlogs within defined timeframes. At the District and Sessions Court, Pune, the court-wide average resolution time for disposed cases stands at 344 days — nearly a full year. That average is misleading. It is pulled down by the rapid disposal of bail applications, which constitute a plurality of filings and are typically resolved within two to six weeks. Strip those out and the picture sharpens: sessions trials take an average of 455 to 828 days depending on the bench, motor accident compensation petitions are pending at rates of 96–100% on several dockets, and Darkhast cases — proceedings initiated by litigants who already hold court decrees but cannot enforce them — sit at an average of 442 to 1,102 days before disposal. Of the court's 102,557 total cases, 26,886 (26.2%) remain pending. That is more than a quarter of every case ever filed, still unresolved, still consuming the time and money of people who came to this court seeking justice. ---

The Full Scorecard: All 26 Benches

The table below covers every bench with at least 30 cases on record. Petitioner win percentage excludes settled matters and applies only to disposed cases with a recorded outcome. Court averages: 344 days average resolution | 65.3% petitioner win | 34.7% respondent win | 5.0% settlement rate. The spread across these benches is the most important single finding. On resolution speed, the fastest-disposing benches — District Judge-19 at 102 days, District Judge-13 at 126 days — move cases nearly ten times faster than District Judge-23 at 992 days. On petitioner win rates, the gap runs from 37.5% to 84.9% — a 47-point range within a single court applying uniform law. Neither number can be explained by case-type mix alone. ---

The Backlog Crisis

Three numbers anchor the backlog story. There are 26,886 total pending cases — each one a person or institution still waiting for a decision. Across the 15 busiest pending dockets, 10,556 cases have been waiting over one year, 6,459 over two years, and 3,451 over three years. On District Judge-17 (Additional Sessions Judge), the average pending case is already 1,624 days old — four years and five months — and has not yet received a decision. District Judge-17 deserves particular attention. Of its 2,764 total cases, 2,021 (73.1%) remain pending. The bench handles Motor Accident Claims Petitions (M.A.C.P.), and the case-type breakdown reveals the crisis: of 1,307 MACP filings, only 50 — a 3.8% disposal rate — have been resolved. Of 492 MACP miscellaneous applications, only 4 have been resolved (0.8%). These are cases brought by people who were injured in road accidents, or by the families of those killed. They came to this court seeking compensation. More than four years later, on average, they are still waiting. ---

Judge-by-Judge: The Full Profile

District Judge-16 — 5,938 Cases

**At a glance:** Total 5,938 | Disposed 3,861 (65.0%) | Pending 2,077 | Avg resolution 303 days | Avg pending age 507 days | Petitioner win 60.0% | Settlement 5.1% | Pending >3 years: 309 **Case type breakdown:** **Top petitioner lawyers:** Kamble Satish Suresh 231 appearances; Purohit Yashpal Dattaprasad 53 / 37 wins / 69.8% win rate; Jadhav Maruti Devidas 42 / 24 / 70.6%; Maniyar Wahid Gulamohammad 42 / 26 / 61.9%; Rajendra Gangadhar Sonawale 22 / 20 / 95.2%. District Judge-16 carries the court's largest active docket. Its overall disposal rate of 65.0% is below the court average of 73.8%, but the critical finding is in the MACP category. Of 830 motor accident compensation petitions, only 9 have been disposed — a 1.1% disposal rate. The 322 MACP miscellaneous applications fare no better at 1.2%. Combined, this bench holds 1,361 unresolved accident compensation matters. The 209 MACP Darkhast cases (enforcement of MACP decrees) are 99% pending, meaning even accident victims who obtained decrees cannot enforce them. Bail applications resolve in 24 days — necessary for personal liberty — but the contrast with accident claimants who wait indefinitely before the same bench is stark. ---

District Judge-23 — 5,593 Cases

**At a glance:** Total 5,593 | Disposed 4,222 (75.5%) | Pending 1,371 | Avg resolution **992 days** | Avg pending age 542 days | Petitioner win **37.5%** | Settlement 1.5% | Pending >3 years: 232 **Case type breakdown:** **The District Judge-23 Anomaly.** This bench records the court's longest average disposal time at 992 days — nearly three years per resolved case. That figure is almost entirely explained by one case type: Darkhast. Of 5,593 total cases, 3,583 are Darkhast proceedings, and those 3,556 disposed Darkhast cases averaged 1,102 days each. Darkhast proceedings are initiated by litigants who hold court decrees — who have already won cases — but whose judgment-debtors refuse to comply. The fact that this bench handles 64% of its entire docket in decree-execution cases, and that those cases average over three years to resolve, means that winning a case here is not the end of the legal journey. It may be merely the beginning of a second, longer one. The petitioner win rate of 37.5% is the lowest in the court, sitting 27.8 percentage points below the 65.3% court average. The 464 Civil M.A. cases with only 6.5% disposal and the 42 MACP matters with zero disposal round out a picture of a bench that processes execution matters at volume while substantive categories accumulate. The 153 cases listing "Unknown Person" as respondent, all with no recorded outcome, are an administrative irregularity that warrants audit by court administration. ---

District Judge-13 (Additional Sessions Judge) — 5,399 Cases

**At a glance:** Total 5,399 | Disposed 4,235 (78.4%) | Pending 1,164 | Avg resolution **126 days** | Avg pending age 657 days | Petitioner win 68.2% | Settlement 3.2% | Pending >3 years: 263 **Case type breakdown:** **Top petitioner lawyers:** Mate Raju Laxmanrao 160 appearances / 115 wins / 74.2%; MATE SHRINATH RAJU 130 / 84 / 87.5%; Mate Shrinath Raju 115 / 74 / 77.1%; Sadiya Khan 48 / 24 / 77.4%; Maniyar Wahid Gulamohammad 45 / 32 / 72.7%; Sayed Munawar Mehboob 41 / 29 / 76.3%. This bench is the court's fastest by average resolution at 126 days. The 95.9% bail application disposal rate (35 days) is consistent with court norms. What distinguishes this bench is the MACP disposal rate of 89.4% across 151 accident compensation petitions — the highest MACP disposal rate among all high-volume benches in this court, and a direct contrast with the sub-4% rates on District Judge-16 and District Judge-17. Lawyer Mate Raju Laxmanrao is the most prolific petitioner lawyer before this bench, appearing 160 times with a 74.2% contested win rate. MATE SHRINATH RAJU (130 appearances, 87.5% win rate) and Mate Shrinath Raju (115 appearances, 77.1% win rate) appear to be records of the same practitioner with name-formatting variations across filings. ---

District Judge-10 — 4,358 Cases

**At a glance:** Total 4,358 | Disposed 3,688 (84.6%) | Pending 670 | Avg resolution 217 days | Avg pending age 584 days | Petitioner win 69.5% | Settlement 0.1% | Pending >3 years: 128 **Case type breakdown:** **Top petitioner lawyers:** Assistant Public Prosecutor 379 appearances / 18 wins / 90.0%; Purohit Yashpal Dattaprasad 53 / 37 / 69.8%; Rajendra Gangadhar Sonawale 22 / 20 / 95.2%; Lonandkar Rahul Arjun 29 / 22 / 75.9%; DUBEY SANTOSH BATESHWARNATH 26 / 19 / 79.2%. District Judge-10 has a disposal rate of 84.6% with a 217-day average anchored by its heavy bail application caseload. The non-bail docket reveals slower performance: Special Cases (POCSO, organised crime, specially designated matters) have a 25.1% disposal rate at 661 days average, and Sessions Cases clear only 22.1% at 828 days average. Darkhast cases are 100% disposed but average 1,184 days. The 0.1% settlement rate is notable — this bench reaches explicit judicial outcomes in almost every contested case rather than facilitated settlements. ---

District Judge-17 (Additional Sessions Judge) — 2,764 Cases

**At a glance:** Total 2,764 | Disposed 743 (26.9%) | Pending 2,021 | Avg resolution 97 days | Avg pending age **1,624 days** | Petitioner win 68.2% | Settlement 12.2% | Pending >3 years: 259 **Case type breakdown:** **Top petitioner lawyers:** Self (pro se) 127 appearances; Hussain Sayyed 87; Self 74; adv. pranit santosh gajare 61; WASHIMBEKAR NAGESH DATTATRAYA 43; PATNI ASHISH ANIL 39 / 5 wins; GUNJAL ATUL BABURAO 39; DHAMANKAR KANCHAN DILIP 30 / 4 wins; SHINDE GAJANAN PRABHAKAR 29 / 14 wins. **The District Judge-17 Crisis.** This bench has the lowest disposal rate in the court at 26.9%, but the number understates the severity of what is happening within it. The bench holds primarily Motor Accident Claims: 1,307 MACP petitions, 492 MACP miscellaneous applications, and 256 MACP execution proceedings. Of those 2,055 accident compensation matters, a combined total of 67 have been disposed — a 3.3% disposal rate across the category. The average pending case before this bench has been waiting 1,624 days — four years and five months — without resolution. The 127 self-represented petitioners (recorded as "self") and 87 appearances under "Hussain Sayyed" suggest a significant proportion of claimants navigating this backlogged docket without legal counsel. Each pending matter represents a person who survived a road accident, or the family of someone who did not, waiting in a queue that is 97% full and barely moving. ---

District Judge-7 — 2,601 Cases

**At a glance:** Total 2,601 | Disposed 2,102 (80.8%) | Pending 499 | Avg resolution 220 days | Avg pending age 600 days | Petitioner win **84.9%** | Settlement 16.7% | Pending >3 years: 141 District Judge-7 records the court's highest petitioner win rate at 84.9% — 19.6 percentage points above the court average of 65.3%. Its settlement rate of 16.7% is the second-highest among active benches. A disposal rate of 80.8% and 220-day average both sit above the court median. The combination — above-average speed, above-average settlement, highest petitioner win rate in the court — is statistically distinctive across a caseload of 2,601 matters. No other bench consistently decides in favour of the petitioning party at this rate. Whether this reflects case-type specialisation, interpretive approach, or other factors is not determinable from the public record, but a litigant whose matter is assigned here has a materially higher probability of a petitioner-favourable outcome than anywhere else in this court. ---

District Judge-21 — 2,774 Cases

**At a glance:** Total 2,774 | Disposed 1,308 (47.2%) | Pending 1,466 | Avg resolution 405 days | Avg pending age 591 days | Petitioner win 53.0% | Settlement **30.6%** | Pending >3 years: 313 District Judge-21's settlement rate of 30.6% is by far the highest in the court — the court average is 5.0%. Nearly one in three disposed cases concludes through settlement rather than a contested ruling. The disposal rate of 47.2% is the third-lowest among active benches. The petitioner win rate of 53.0% sits 12 points below the court average. These three numbers describe a bench where cases either resolve by agreement or remain unresolved; adversarial judicial determinations are rare. Parties who come here seeking a clear decision wait 405 days on average, and among those who receive a contested outcome, 47% receive a result against them — well above the court-wide respondent win rate of 34.7%. ---

Adhoc District Judge-1 — 2,773 Cases

**At a glance:** Total 2,773 | Disposed 1,181 (42.6%) | Pending 1,592 | Avg resolution 291 days | Avg pending age 634 days | Petitioner win 56.8% | Settlement 7.6% | Pending >3 years: 373 With a disposal rate of 42.6%, Adhoc District Judge-1 has the second-lowest disposal rate among active benches. Of its 1,592 pending cases, 911 have been waiting over one year, 604 over two years, and 373 over three years. The Land Acquisition Officer No. 13, Pune appears as respondent in 53 cases before this bench, all pending, with zero outcomes recorded. These are disputes between landowners and the State of Maharashtra over compensation for compulsorily acquired land — often the most significant financial event in a landowner's life — sitting unresolved at an average pending age of 634 days. ---

The MACP Crisis: Accident Victims Left Waiting

The most striking finding in this dataset concerns Motor Accident Claims Petitions. Across two high-volume benches — District Judge-16 and District Judge-17 (Addl. S.J.) — the combined MACP inventory totals 2,137 petitions at a 2.8% combined disposal rate. The contrast with District Judge-13 is the clearest indicator of what is achievable. District Judge-13 has disposed 89.4% of its 151 MACP petitions — at 698 days average per case, still below ideal speed, but an outcome vastly different from 3.8%. Motor Accident Claims Tribunals exist because Parliament recognised that accident compensation demands speed that ordinary civil courts cannot provide. When 2,078 MACP petitions sit unresolved on two benches alone, and the average pending case on District Judge-17 is already 1,624 days old, the tribunal mechanism has ceased to function as designed on those dockets. ---

The Darkhast Bog: Decrees Without Enforcement

Darkhast proceedings are initiated when a litigant holds a court decree — has already won a case — but the judgment-debtor refuses to comply. They represent a secondary failure: the first proceeding has concluded, the court has ruled, but the judgment remains unenforceable without a second, parallel set of proceedings. Across the court, Darkhast cases average between 442 and 1,184 days to resolve depending on the bench. District Judge-23 carries the largest Darkhast docket — 3,583 of its 5,593 total cases, averaging 1,102 days per resolved matter. District Judge-3's 1,563 Darkhast cases averaged 1,112 days. District Judge-10's 430 Darkhast cases — all 100% disposed — averaged 1,184 days. The practical consequence is that a litigant who files, litigates, and wins a case in Pune district court may still require a further three years of proceedings before that victory translates into enforceable compliance. ---

The Respondent Lawyer Duration Effect

Among respondent lawyers with 30 or more appearances court-wide, the five with the longest average case duration are associated with cases that are overwhelmingly still pending. Jadhav Narendra Dattoba and Sonawale Rajendra Gangadhar each appear as respondent counsel with 100% of their matters still pending, averaging over 1,000 days. Mate Raju Laxmanrao (123 respondent appearances, 91.9% pending, zero respondent wins in decided matters) simultaneously appears as the most active petitioner lawyer before District Judge-13, where he achieves a 74.2% contested win rate. These practitioners appear on both sides of different matters — not unusual in district court practice — but the concentration of long-pending cases in the respondent columns of a small number of practitioners is visible in the data. ---

What the Data Means

First, the court processes certain categories rapidly and others not at all. Bail applications resolve in 14–51 days across virtually every bench and inflate aggregate disposal rates in ways that obscure the true experience of MACP, civil appeal, and Darkhast litigants. A petitioner in a motor accident compensation case before District Judge-17 is not experiencing a 344-day court. That person is experiencing a 1,624-day wait with no resolution in sight. Second, a 47-point gap in petitioner win rates across the same court is not a sampling artifact. District Judge-23's 37.5% petitioner win rate and District Judge-7's 84.9% rate cover 5,593 and 2,601 cases respectively. At those sample sizes, the difference cannot be attributed to chance. Whether it reflects different case-type assignments, different substantive approaches, or other administrative factors is not determinable from case records alone — but any litigant whose case is assigned to one bench rather than the other has a materially different probability of winning. Third, the MACP situation on District Judge-16 and District Judge-17 constitutes a structural failure of a specific legal guarantee. Motor Accident Claims Tribunals exist because Parliament recognised that accident compensation demands speed ordinary civil courts cannot provide. When 2,137 MACP petitions sit at a 2.8% combined disposal rate, and the average pending matter on District Judge-17 is already 1,624 days old, the tribunal mechanism has ceased to function as designed on those dockets. Fourth, the Darkhast backlog means that a court decree is worth less than its paper in practice. When decree-execution proceedings average 1,100 days, people who have already won cases must return for second, longer proceedings before their legal victories translate into actual compliance. Fifth, where the data shows efficient performance, it is worth naming. District Judge-13 (Addl. Sessions Judge) resolves cases in 126 days on average and disposes 89.4% of its MACP caseload. District Judge-19 (Addl. Sessions Judge) clears cases in 102 days. These benches demonstrate that the court's physical and administrative infrastructure is capable of substantially faster resolution across difficult case types. The variation across benches is not uniform, and the best-performing dockets provide a clear reference point for what is achievable within this court. ---

About the Data and Methodology

All 102,557 case records analysed in this report were retrieved from the District and Sessions Court, Pune's publicly accessible case management portal. Processing through Judge My Lawyer's analytics pipeline involved: adjudicator name consolidation (minor formatting variants mapped to canonical bench designations), duration correction (zero-duration filings excluded from averages), outcome standardisation (values normalised to three categories: petitioner win, respondent win, settled), and status-outcome separation (the source system records status and outcome independently — both fields are treated on their own terms). Petitioner win rates throughout exclude settled matters and apply only to disposed cases with a recorded outcome. Approximately 27,402 disposed cases carry no recorded outcome and are excluded from win-rate calculations. All figures are subject to the completeness and accuracy of the court's own record-keeping. Two entries for "DISTRICT JUDGE -18 ADDL. SESSIONS JUDGE PUNE" appear with slight name-formatting differences in the source data and are listed separately in the scorecard. ---

Disclaimer

The findings in this report are based entirely on publicly available court records and reflect those records as of May 2026. Statistical patterns identified describe empirical regularities in the data as recorded. They do not constitute allegations of bias, partiality, misconduct, or wrongdoing against any adjudicator, advocate, or institution. Anomalies noted may reflect administrative recording conventions, interim order documentation practices, case-type specialisation assignments, data-entry inconsistencies, or procedural factors not visible in the public record. The variation in petitioner win rates across benches reflects recorded outcomes in disposed cases and does not account for differences in case-type composition or the legal merits of individual matters. This report is published for informational and research purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.