NCLT, India's IBC Courtroom: 18,971 Orders Across Sixteen Benches

Three out of every four IBC orders come from a single forum — and the geography of that forum is Mumbai, Delhi, and the spine of corporate India

Three-quarters of all IBC orders in this corpus come from the National Company Law Tribunal. The NCLT is not, strictly, a “court” — it is a quasi-judicial Adjudicating Authority constituted under the Companies Act, with specific jurisdiction over insolvency proceedings under the IBC. But functionally, it is the courtroom of Indian corporate insolvency.

Every CIRP begins here. Every plan is approved or rejected here. Every Section 14 moratorium is declared here.

In the eight years this corpus spans, the Supreme Court did 643 IBC orders. The NCLAT did 4,327. The NCLT did 18,971.

How has NCLT volume moved year on year?

The same shape as the corpus-wide pattern, because the NCLT is most of the corpus: 2019 first peak, COVID dip, 2022-23 second peak, 2024 tapering. There is no real evidence in this data that the NCLT is becoming faster or more efficient over time — the volume mostly tracks the flow of admissions and the lifecycle of CIRPs.

Which six NCLT benches do 71% of the work?

The NCLT has roughly sixteen benches spread across major Indian cities, plus the Principal Bench in New Delhi. After bench-name normalisation, the distribution of IBC work is:

The pattern is what one would expect from Indian corporate geography: Mumbai and New Delhi together account for over 9,000 orders, roughly 49% of all NCLT IBC work. Add Kolkata, Chennai, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad and you have ~71% of NCLT IBC work concentrated in the top six benches.

The concentration tracks corporate India’s stress geography.

• Mumbai houses the largest financial-creditor cluster (the big banks’ debt recovery teams), the largest base of large corporate debtors, and the busiest legal-services market.
• New Delhi handles the NCR-and-northern caseload plus the Principal Bench’s centrally-allocated matters.
• Hyderabad and Bengaluru have grown faster than expected over the 2020-2024 window — Hyderabad in part because of the cluster of real-estate CIRPs originating in Andhra/Telangana, Bengaluru because of the wave of mid-2010s startup-stage debt that matured into IBC admissions in the 2020s.

Do Mumbai and Delhi NCLT benches lean differently?

The two largest NCLT benches handle, between them, about 9,200 IBC orders. There are persistent informal claims — among practitioners — that the two benches lean differently on questions of:

• Threshold of “default” for Section 7 — Mumbai more inclined to admit; New Delhi (post-Vidarbha) more inclined to scrutinise.
• Section 12A withdrawals — Mumbai more flexible; New Delhi more textual about the 90% CoC vote.
• Operational-creditor pre-existing-dispute tests — Mumbai applies Mobilox tighter; New Delhi looser.

The data does not let us cleanly test these claims at the doctrinal level — outcome aggregates by bench show roughly similar dismissal and admission rates, and the underlying case mix differs. But the volume difference is real: Mumbai handles more, New Delhi handles fewer but bigger.

Why does no NCLT bench keep the statutory 330-day deadline?

Section 12(3) of the Code mandates that CIRP be completed within 330 days of admission. The corpus does not reliably store admission-date metadata for every CIRP, but for the subset where it can be reconstructed (case number pattern + plan-approval date), the median CIRP duration to plan approval at the largest benches is:

All comfortably past 330 days. None of the major benches operates within the statutory timeline. This is not a Mumbai problem or a New Delhi problem; it is a systemic feature of the IBC’s implementation. The 330-day clock has been described, in our CIRP funnel article, as “a fiction observed in form and breached in substance.” The bench-wise data confirms that no bench escapes the fiction.

What this article shows

The IBC, in volume terms, is an NCLT statute. 75.6% of all orders in this corpus come from the NCLT. The NCLAT, the SC, the High Courts, the IBBI Disciplinary Committee, and the rest combined account for less than a quarter.

The NCLT’s IBC work is geographically concentrated: six benches — Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad — handle roughly 71% of all NCLT IBC orders. The smaller benches handle the residue.

And the NCLT, across all benches, does not meet the 330-day statutory timeline. The Code’s most aspirational promise — speed — is, on this evidence, comprehensively not delivered. Whether the answer is more NCLT members, more benches, better case management, or a fundamental redesign of the Code is — like a lot of IBC — contested.

Read next: The Day Personal Guarantors Came Onshore — the May 2021 Supreme Court judgment that opened the IBC’s second front.