Gujarat slips in India Justice Report 2025: From model state to mid-table performer

Overall ranking in IJR reports

By Rajiv Shah

The latest India Justice Report (IJR), prepared by legal experts with the backing of several civil society organisations and aimed at ranking the capacity of states to deliver justice, has found Gujarat—considered by India's rulers as a model state for others to follow—slipping to the 11th position from fourth in 2022.

Assessing 18 major states, identified as "large and mid-sized states", the 212-page report uses the "filters of human resources, infrastructure, budgets, workload and diversity" to evaluate the capacity of four core pillars of the justice system: police, prisons, judiciary, and legal aid.

There is a separate assessment of 23 State Human Rights Commissions across as many states, where the report ranks Gujarat 20th, with only three states performing worse—Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh. However, the report does not provide comparative data for previous years.

Offering a comprehensive picture from the previous three IJR reports on the four pillars of social justice—police, prisons, judiciary, and legal aid—the report shows that Gujarat steadily improved its position from 8th in 2019, to 6th in 2020, and a significant jump to 4th in 2022, before slipping sharply to 11th in 2025.

Judiciary, Legal Aid

Jointly prepared by the Centre for Social Justice, Common Cause, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), Daksh, and TISS-Prayas, which hired legal experts to separately assess each of the four pillars, the report states that the rankings reflect the year-on-year efforts made by state governments to improve justice administration on the ground.

The report maintains that the IJR would serve as "an easy but comprehensive tool" for policymakers to adopt "holistic policy frameworks" and identify "low-hanging fruit which, if tackled early on, can set off a chain reaction reformative of the whole." It would also assist donors, civil society, and the business community by offering objective data around which key stakeholders can shape their recommendations.

Claiming that this could trigger "participatory dialogues between governments and active citizens of disparate ideologies, underpinned by objective facts rather than premised in opinion", the report argues it would enhance the "chances for reforms through consensus building."

Based on publicly available data from various government bodies and the judiciary, the report finds that South Indian states—Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu—consistently outperform all 18 major states across the four key pillars of justice. In contrast, states performing worse than Gujarat include Haryana, Bihar, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal.

Police, Jails

Analysing the four pillars separately, the report finds that Gujarat’s performance remains around the 9th position for police and prisons across all four IJR assessments. However, it significantly declines in the other two pillars: in judiciary, Gujarat slips to the 14th position in 2025 from 7th in 2019, 8th in 2020, and 9th in 2022; and in legal aid, it falls to 13th in 2025 from 6th in 2019, 9th in 2020, and 3rd in 2022.

The report attributes Gujarat’s poor judicial ranking to multiple factors: per capita spending on the judiciary dropped to Rs 101—the lowest among all 18 states; the population per High Court judge is 3,836,147—the highest in India; subordinate court judges face a 31.1% vacancy rate, while the High Court staff vacancy is at 46.6%—again the highest in India.

Regarding the legal aid category, Gujarat's low ranking, the report suggests, may stem from its Lok Adalats not only taking up "relatively few cases", but also having the lowest clearance rate in India—only 11,000 matters cleared, which amounts to just 2%. In contrast, the next better performers were Rajasthan with 3% and Maharashtra with 9%.

SHRCs

The report emphasises that Lok Adalats are a critical component of India’s legal aid framework, designed to amicably resolve disputes outside the formal court system. "These forums are meant to reduce court backlogs, promote speedy justice, and foster a culture of amicable settlement," it states.

While making few comments on individual states' performance, the report notes, "The number of people served by an urban police station varies vastly—from 8,500 in a small state like Arunachal to 2.8 lakh in Gujarat."

As for social justice in police recruitment, the report observes that, nationally, "fulfilling Scheduled Caste (SC) quotas lags behind meeting Scheduled Tribes (ST) and Other Backward Classes (OBC) quotas." It adds, "Only four states—Gujarat, Manipur, Karnataka, and Himachal Pradesh—met their SC quotas at both officer and constabulary levels."

Regarding State Citizen Portals, intended to enhance public engagement with law enforcement by offering services such as FIR registration, complaint submission, and cybercrime reporting, the report laments, "no state portal offered the complete suite of mandated services." However, it acknowledges that "Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh stand out for providing 90 per cent of the services," and that "Gujarat and Sikkim maintain well-updated and user-friendly websites."

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