Last week, Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, asking him to increase the Supreme Court’s current sanctioned strength of 31 judges, ostensibly to tackle the continuing rise in pendency of cases. The court, which began with a sanctioned strength of eight judges, saw the number of judges rise to 11 in 1956, 14 in 1960, 18 in 1978, 26 in 1986 and 31 in 2008. Rather than increasing the number of judges mechanically every few years, the question that needs to be asked is why earlier increases have had little effect on reducing pendency, if that has been the objective. On the contrary, there is enough data to show that adding to the number of Supreme Court judges means more division benches of two or more judges, leading to multiplicity of judgments. The resulting incoherence among the judges, in turn, leads to lack of certainty about precedents and reference to larger benches for reconsideration of decided cases. When the CJI, who is authorised to constitute larger benches for such reconsideration, is unable to do so for lack of sufficient judges, similar cases whose outcomes depend on reconsideration keep accumulating, leading to greater pendency. In other words, this is a vicious cycle. It is to avoid this possibility that the Supreme Court, in its early days, used to sit en banc (full court) to decide cases. But the continuing rise in the number of judges made this tradition impractical. The famous US Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter suggested to India’s constitutional adviser B.N. Rau during the preparation of India’s draft constitution that it should have a provision to enable the court to sit en banc to decide all cases. But his advice was ignored. Former Chief Justice of India T.S. Thakur rightly understood the implications of the crisis posed by the docket explosion when he prioritised the hearing of a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by advocate V. Vasanthakumar from Puducherry. The petition sought the establishment of a National Court of Appeal with benches of the Supreme Court in Chennai, Mumbai and Calcutta. The PIL was supported by senior counsel K.K. Venugopal, who was also appointed as the case’s amicus curiae. Considering the complexity of the issue, the CJI Thakur-led bench referred it to a constitution bench, as the CJI was close to retirement. His successors, however, have not felt a similar urgency to prioritise the matter and constitute a constitution bench for this purpose.