The India Justice Report (IJR) is a unique, comprehensive quantitative index that ranks the capacity of India's state-level justice delivery system. It is a concept and a periodic national assessment, not an act or institution. The IJR was initiated by Tata Trusts and first published in 2019 in collaboration with a consortium of civil society organizations like Common Cause and Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. It was created to systematically evaluate the performance and capacity of justice institutions, addressing the problem that their collective capacity was rarely objectively assessed despite frequent complaints about their shortcomings.
The report works by assessing the capacity of four core pillars of the justice system: the Police, Judiciary, Prisons, and Legal Aid. In recent editions, it has also included a standalone assessment of State Human Rights Commissions (SHRCs). The IJR uses publicly available government data to rank all 36 States and Union Territories, categorizing them into large/mid-sized (population over 1 crore) and small (population less than 1 crore) for fair comparison. Performance is measured across six standardized themes: Human Resources, Infrastructure, Budgets, Workload, Diversity, and Trends (or intention to improve). Benchmarks are often taken from hard laws, policy pronouncements, and Supreme Court judgments.
The IJR connects directly to the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987, by assessing the performance of the legal aid system, including the number of Paralegal Volunteers (PLVs). It also connects to the Law Commission of India's 1987 recommendation of 50 judges per million people, by highlighting the current gap of only 15 judges per million. The latest editions, such as the 2025 report, have deepened the assessment by adding new indicators, bringing the total to 102, and have included a focus on forensics and mediation. The core mechanism of ranking states based on their capacity across the four pillars has remained the same since the first edition in 2019.