Eight years, 25,106 orders, and the five themes that run through them
When the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code was passed in 2016, it carried a slogan that has aged unevenly: time-bound, creditor-led, market-driven. Eight years on, with twenty-five thousand one hundred and six written orders in the IBBI corpus from 2017 to the end of 2024, the slogan is worth re-reading.
The Code has become India’s most-litigated commercial statute. It has produced more reportable Supreme Court judgments per year than the Companies Act, the Arbitration Act, or the Income Tax Act. It has redrawn the relationship between promoters and lenders, between operational creditors and financial creditors, between the tax department and the Committee of Creditors. It has also, depending on which corner of the data one looks at, done none of those things particularly well.
What this magazine is — and isn’t
This magazine is not a textbook. It is a chronicle, drawn from the orders themselves. Each article rests on a slice of the corpus — sometimes a year, sometimes a court, sometimes a single section of the Code. Where the source text survives in our pipeline, every claim is anchored to a verbatim excerpt and a character offset, so a reader can open the original judgment and verify our reading in seconds rather than minutes.
Five themes recur across the articles that follow.
Why is three-quarters of all IBC work done by a single forum?
Three-quarters of the orders in this corpus — 18,971 of 25,106 — are written by the National Company Law Tribunal. Mumbai and the Principal Bench in New Delhi together account for over a quarter of them. The Code did not just introduce a new procedure for insolvency; it built a parallel commercial bench. That bench, on the evidence here, is now where Indian corporate distress goes to be adjudicated.
What does the funnel from admission to resolution really look like?
Six thousand two hundred and ten orders end in admission — the Adjudicating Authority finding a default and triggering the moratorium. For every resolution plan approved (1,681), nearly four cases are admitted. The funnel from admission to resolution narrows hard. The next article in this series — The CIRP Funnel That Narrows Hard — walks through where those cases actually end up.
How does the appellate ladder behave?
The NCLAT dismisses more appeals than it allows — 1,265 dismissed against 802 allowed across the eight-year window. The Supreme Court is more evenly split, but on landmark matters it has tended, since 2019, to defer to the commercial wisdom of the Committee of Creditors. The doctrine has held for five years. Even Vidarbha Industries v. Axis Bank (2022), which complicated it, has been narrowed by subsequent benches.
When did the IBC become a statute that bites individuals?
In May 2021, the Supreme Court in Lalit Kumar Jain v. Union of India upheld the November 2019 notification bringing personal guarantors to corporate debtors within the IBC. Before that decision, the personal-guarantor subdomain barely existed in this corpus. After it, the caseload became a flood: 547 orders in 2022 alone, 1,492 cumulatively. Personal liability is now the IBC’s second front of litigation, and one of three feature stories in this issue covers it.
What hasn’t the Code actually done yet?
Section 29A’s promoter bar remains contested. Group insolvency lives in 22 NCLT orders and a few academic papers. Cross-border has nine entries across eight years. Pre-pack, four years after its introduction for MSMEs, has produced 86 orders — a rounding error in a corpus this size. The frameworks the Code built to widen its footprint have not, in volume terms, been used.
Why the data, and not the slogan
The IBC was meant to resolve. It has produced a vast, layered, deeply contested jurisprudence. The data — twenty-five thousand and change written orders, eight years of court time — is more interesting than the slogan, and a great deal more honest about what the Code has become.
The chronicle that follows is one reading of it.
— The Editors
Read next: IBC by the Numbers — the statistical portrait that frames everything else.