India’s tribunal system,  built to take specialised disputes off the overloaded courts,  is stuck. Two of its most important appellate bodies have no regular head. Debt appeal tribunals have empty chairs. Entire benches of the Armed Forces Tribunal have no one to hear cases. And the new machinery that is supposed to end the vacancies has not yet made a single selection.

Two headless appellate tribunals

The Appellate Tribunal for Electricity (APTEL) has had no regular chairperson since 27 February 2026, when Justice Ramesh Ranganathan left. Seema Gupta, its Technical Member (Electricity), has run it as officiating chairperson since, and in September her charge was extended for six months from 27 August. The Electricity Act requires the chairperson to be a former Supreme Court judge or High Court Chief Justice; a technical expert now leads the tribunal, which also carries a vacant Technical Member post.

At the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT), Justice Ashok Bhushan retired on 4 July on turning 70 — a date fixed in the government’s own re-appointment order eight months earlier. Judicial Member Justice (Retd) Yogesh Khanna was made officiating chairperson for three months, and on 8 October that was extended by three more.

The vacancies spread wider

The problem is not confined to two tribunals. The Debts Recovery Appellate Tribunals, which hear banks’ recovery appeals, have no chairpersons at Allahabad and Kolkata. The Department of Financial Services invited applications for both posts on 1 October 2026 — after an earlier call for the same posts in October 2025 failed to fill them.

At the Armed Forces Tribunal, which hears service and pension disputes of soldiers and veterans, the Defence Ministry told the Lok Sabha in July that 12 of 34 member posts were vacant. Three benches — Srinagar, Jabalpur and Guwahati — had no members at all, and about 11,000 cases were pending.

The Income Tax Appellate Tribunal, the oldest of them all, had 98 members in position against 126 sanctioned as of May, according to a parliamentary committee, which said 27 member posts were under recruitment and that shortages were slowing hearings.

Across the 16 tribunals now governed by a common law, the Law Ministry told the Rajya Sabha in December 2025 that 94 of 518 sanctioned member posts were vacant, with more than 5.24 lakh cases pending.

How the gridlock built up

On 19 November 2025, in the Madras Bar Association case, the Supreme Court struck down key parts of the Tribunals Reforms Act, 2021 for giving the government excessive control over appointments and tenure. It sharply criticised the Centre for repeatedly ignoring its directions, linking that to vacancies that had pushed some tribunals close to shutting down. It ordered a National Tribunals Commission (NTC) within four months.

That deadline passed with no commission. To stop benches collapsing as members retired, the court in March 2026 allowed the Centre to extend the tenure of retiring chairpersons and members until 8 September; in May it widened that to cover everyone due to retire before that date. The bench openly questioned the practice of sweeping extensions granted without any check on performance.

Parliament then passed the Tribunals Reforms Act, 2026, which received Presidential assent on 13 August, three days after it was introduced; the Lok Sabha passed it without debate. It brings 16 tribunals, including NCLAT, APTEL, ITAT, CESTAT, NGT, AFT, CAT, TDSAT, SAT and the DRTs, under one framework, and its transitional provisions allowed existing members to be continued. In September, for instance, the Corporate Affairs Ministry extended eight NCLAT members’ tenure under the new Act.

Extensions keep sitting members in place. They do not fill empty chairs. That requires the NTC, which must first be appointed, then set up search-cum-selection committees for each tribunal, which must advertise, assess and recommend, after which the Centre has up to three months to appoint. The rules to run this were notified only on 30 September. No appointment of the Commission’s chairperson or members had been reported as of mid-October.

The rules themselves say selection should start at least six months before a vacancy arises. The APTEL and NCLAT vacancies, both known well in advance, show how far reality is from that standard.

More litigation ahead

The new law may not end the fight. Commentators note that the Commission’s chairperson and judicial members are appointed by the government after merely consulting the Chief Justice of India, and its technical members with no judicial input at all — the same executive dominance the court has struck down before, now one level higher. Several expect fresh challenges, which could freeze appointments again. Some lawyers also warn that the Commission adds another layer of process to an already overstretched system.

Why it matters

Tribunals were meant to deliver faster, expert justice. Instead, litigants face caretaker heads on short extensions, benches that cannot sit, and growing backlogs. For creditors in insolvency cases, delay erodes recoveries; for power companies and consumers, unresolved tariff disputes hit finances; for soldiers and veterans in regions with no AFT members, it can mean no hearing at all. Until the Commission starts selecting, the gridlock will hold.