The Delhi High Court Bar Association’s recent call to strike over a committee formed to enhance district court pecuniary jurisdiction has reignited an old institutional debate. This dispute exposes a deeper, structural flaw in our judicial architecture, Why are Constitutional Courts in India still functioning as trial courts for high-value civil suits? Retaining Ordinary Original Civil Jurisdiction (OOCJ) based purely on the financial value of a case undermines the constitutional stature of our High Courts.
THE COLONIAL ORIGINS OF OOCJ
The original jurisdiction of certain Indian High Courts to try high-value civil suits is a structural legacy of British colonial administration. Prior to 1950, the Charter High Courts served an imperial economic mandate: the British administration sought to insulate high-value commercial and corporate disputes from native subordinate courts, ensuring they were adjudicated exclusively by British judges to protect imperial financial interests.
This centralized control was institutionalized by the British Parliament through the Indian High Courts Act, 1861, which merged the Supreme Courts and Sadar Adalats to establish the High Courts of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. The Letters Patent of 1865 formally vested these Charter High Courts with Ordinary Original Civil Jurisdiction (OOCJ) within the territorial limits of the presidency towns. Consequently, major commercial disputes—such as shipping litigation at the Calcutta port or banking controversies in Bombay bypassed the local subordinate judiciary entirely. The High Court functioned directly as the court of first instance, creating a forum structured to protect the commercial equities of the British Crown rather than serve the broader domestic litigant base. Under this system, if a high-stakes commercial dispute arose over shipping cargo at the Calcutta port or a banking contract in Bombay, the case bypassed local subordinate judges completely. By virtue of OOCJ, the High Court itself stepped in as the trial court. This mechanism was explicitly built to serve the commercial interests of the East India Company and the British Crown, not the general Indian litigant.
THE MISSING REFORM OF 1950: ARTICLE 225
When the Constitution came into force, the Charter High Courts already had the best infrastructure, organized bars, and senior lawyers who were used to handling big litigation. On top of that, the Constituent Assembly was busy dealing with bigger structural issues—like setting up the Supreme Court and ensuring judicial independence.
Because of this, nobody really questioned the internal colonial setup of these High Courts. They just passed Article 225, which let the existing High Courts keep whatever jurisdiction they already had before 1950. By letting that clause slip through, the framers accidentally copy-pasted a British trial-court model straight into our independent republic.
THE NCR PARADOX: TRUSTING THE DISTRICT JUDICIARY
While Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of Gram Swaraj led to the decentralization of legislative and executive powers through Articles 40, 243, and 243W, judicial decentralization has been largely ignored. Under Article 215, High Courts are independent constitutional entities, holding a stature equal to the Supreme Court within their territories. Forcing them to spend valuable judicial hours recording evidence and deciding civil trials based on financial thresholds is a waste of constitutional machinery.
Look at the glaring contradiction within the National Capital Region (NCR). In Delhi, under the Delhi High Court (Amendment) Act, 2015, any civil or commercial suit valued above ₹2 Crores goes straight to the High Court’s Original Side. Yet, just fifteen kilometers away in Noida or Gurugram, the Allahabad High Court and the Punjab & Haryana High Court hold no such original jurisdiction. Does this mean a civil judge in Uttar Pradesh or Haryana is more competent to handle a high-value contract than a civil judge in Delhi? Obviously not. If a District and Sessions Judge is trusted under the law to conduct murder trials and award life imprisonment or the death penalty, it makes no sense to claim they lack the competence to decide a civil suit just because it exceeds ₹2 Crores.
THE CASE FOR THE STATUS QUO: DEFENDING OOCJ
The institutional defense of Ordinary Original Civil Jurisdiction (OOCJ) rests heavily on the competitive and jurisprudential status these High Courts have achieved as premier hubs for high-value corporate litigation. This specialization is clearest in the Intellectual Property Division (IPD) of the Delhi High Court, constituted under the DHC-IPD Rules, 2022, following the abolition of the Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB). The recent recommendation by the Delhi High Court Full Court to increase the district judiciary’s pecuniary jurisdiction to ₹10 Crore has faced sharp opposition, particularly from the Intellectual Property practitioners of the Delhi High Court Bar Association. Critics argue that raising the threshold to ₹10 Crore will shift the vast majority of commercial and intellectual property suits to the subordinate judiciary, effectively dismantling a highly successful specialized bench by scattering technical disputes across multiple district courts.
Proponents of the status quo contend that intellectual property litigation involves deeply intertwined questions of fact and law such as evaluating an inventive step in patent law or deceptive similarity in trademark disputes that require a mixed question of both fact and law. As statutory frameworks struggle to keep pace with emerging technologies like generative AI, biotechnology, and digital piracy, the law requires continuous, authoritative interpretation. Proponents argue that a constitutional court is uniquely equipped for this task because High Courts possess the equitable flexibility to adapt legal doctrine and craft dynamic remedies. Conversely, subordinate district judges remain bound by rigid statutory text and lack the authority required to shape this nascent jurisprudence.
WHAT THE NJDG DATA ACTUALLY SHOWS
The protectionist argument that keeping high-value cases in the High Court ensures faster disposal is completely debunked by the data. According to the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG), the Original Side of the Delhi High Court is heavily congested, choked with over 9,297 commercial suits and 5,944 original civil suits. Meanwhile, the infrastructure at the district level is vastly underutilized. Consequent to the establishment of dedicated District Commercial Courts, the division of labor has left many district judges with light daily cause lists sometimes dropping into single digits. The capacity to handle these trials exists at the base of the judicial pyramid, but the work remains artificially bottlenecked at the top.
CONCLUSION: REALIZING “JUSTICE AT THE DOORSTEP”
The law on lawyers’ strikes is entirely settled. In Ex-Capt. Harish Uppal v. Union of India, the Supreme Court made it clear that advocates cannot use strikes or the abstention of court work to air grievances, because the ultimate casualty of such actions is the litigant. Both judges and lawyers are equal stakeholders in this system, and our foremost duty is to keep public trust alive. We cannot solve judicial pendency by merely debating abstract macro-level statistics, we have to fix the micro-level mechanics of how cases are distributed.
Section 15 of the CPC lays down a clear procedural mandates that every suit must be filed in the lowest-grade court competent to try it. Keeping high-value trials stuck in the High Court directly violates this principle and defeats the constitutional promise of “justice at the doorstep” under Article 39A. Enhancing the pecuniary jurisdiction of the district judiciary is the only logical step forward. It is time to let the district courts handle the trials they are fully competent to run, allowing the High Court to shed this colonial baggage and focus entirely on its actual constitutional and supervisory mandates.
However, resolving this dispute does not require completely cutting off the High Court from original civil matters. A balanced solution can be developed to accommodate both the district and the High Court judiciaries, particularly in complex fields like intellectual property law. Because the Ordinary Original Civil Jurisdiction of the Delhi High Court is strictly tied to a monetary threshold by Section 5(2) of the Delhi High Court Act, 1966, the High Court cannot use its internal rule-making powers under Article 225 to create subject-matter exceptions on its own. Rules cannot override an Act of Parliament.
Therefore, the ultimate solution requires legislative intervention. Parliament could amend the Delhi High Court Act to transition the court’s original side away from a rigid monetary threshold to a flexible, subject-matter framework. Under this new model, the vast majority of commercial trials would default to the specialized District Commercial Courts. However, the law could provide a formal mechanism—similar to the High Court’s existing power to transfer cases under Section 24 of the CPC allowing the High Court to systematically pull up or retain specific complex cases that involve substantial or novel questions of law requiring authoritative judicial interpretation.
Moving to this flexible, rule-governed boundary rather than relying on arbitrary financial lines is the most viable path forward. It allows the district courts to handle the trials they are fully competent to run, while ensuring that the High Court retains the specialized oversight necessary to shape new legal doctrines. Ultimately, this allows the High Court to shed its colonial trial baggage and focus entirely on its core constitutional and supervisory mandates.
*Manthan Tripathi, Advocate practising before delhi high court and student of LLM from law faculty university of delhi