Justice Nagarathna advises wider use of mediation to ease burden on family courts
Supreme Court Justice B.V. Nagarathna has advocated for the increased use of mediation to resolve family disputes in India. She argues that alternative dispute resolution can reduce the massive backlog of cases and provide more humane outcomes than traditional litigation.
Why it matters
The proposal addresses the systemic issue of judicial delays in India, which currently impacts thousands of families awaiting legal resolution.
Supreme Court judge Justice B.V. Nagarathna on Saturday (September 26, 2026) called for greater reliance on alternative dispute resolution in family litigation, arguing that mediation and conciliation could deliver faster, less adversarial outcomes than prolonged court battles.
Justice Nagarathna was delivering the inaugural address on ‘ADR (alternative dispute resolution) versus Adjudication in Family Disputes: Challenges and Way Forward’ at the Eastern Zone Regional Conference of the Committee for Family Court Matters, Supreme Court of India, in association with the Gauhati High Court, in Guwahati. The Supreme Court judge told delegates that alternative dispute resolution was never intended to compete with the courts but to complement them, offering speed, privacy, and confidentiality that conventional litigation often cannot.
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