Does Disclosure of Supreme Court Judges’ Assets Solve the Issue of Public Trust in the Judiciary?

Introduction

On 1-4-2025, a Full Court meeting held in the Supreme Court passed a resolution mandating Supreme Court Judges to disclose details of their assets to the public (Resolution). This Resolution came in light of the recent Justice Yashwant Varma incident on 14-3-2025, wherein a large sum of unaccounted cash was recovered at the Judge’s premises in a fire incident.¹ As per the Resolution, sitting Judges of the Supreme Court are required to declare their movable and immovable assets and publish them on the Supreme Court’s official website.² Further, whenever any sitting Judge acquires any property of a substantial value or nature, the same must be declared to the Chief Justice and subsequently published on the Supreme Court website.³ The above declaration rules also apply to direct relatives of the Judges, including their spouses and dependants.

Following the passing of the Resolution, 24 out of 33 sitting Supreme Court Judges including former Chief Justices Sanjiv Khanna and B.R. Gavai published details of their assets on the Supreme Court website.⁴ While this Resolution was passed with the idea of bringing in more trust, transparency and accountability in the judiciary, and is a laudable step taken by the Supreme Court, there are certain aspects of it that need to be examined more carefully to analyse whether or not Supreme Court Judges disclosing their assets to the public serves the purpose of the Resolution.

Judicial history

The Resolution is not the first time in the history of the Supreme Court where Judges have agreed to publicly disclose information regarding their assets. In 1997, a Full Court meeting headed by former Chief Justice J.S. Verma published the Restatement of Values of Judicial Life.⁵ This Code, inter alia, states that all Supreme Court Judges must declare their real estate/investment assets to the Chief Justice of India within a reasonable time of assuming office, but the details of the same shall be confidential to the public.⁶ A decade later, in August 2009, former Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan decided to publish details of Supreme Court Judges’ assets on the Supreme Court website, but on an entirely voluntary basis.⁷ Later in September 2009, the Supreme Court encouraged its Judges to disclose their assets’ details to the public, but did not make it mandatory.⁸ Although former Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan stated that High Courts could not be forced to follow suit with the Supreme Court procedure, Judges of the High Courts of Kerala and Delhi disclosed details of their assets to the public.⁹

In 2009, the Chief Information Commissioner ordered the Supreme Court to disclose information about Judges’ personal assets in response to activist Subhash Chandra Agarwal’s right to information (RTI) request. However, the order was challenged by the Supreme Court’s Central Public Information Office (CPIO) and the matter was eventually referred to a five-Judge Constitutional Bench in 2018.¹⁰ In 2019, the Supreme Court’s majority opinion stated information regarding whether or not a Judge has declared their assets would not be considered “personal information” under the Right to Information Act, 2005.

Therefore, the issue pertaining to Judges disclosing their assets has been dealt with historically, and has evolved from being only accessible to the Chief Justice of India in 1997, to public disclosure being voluntary in 2009 and finally, for the first time,¹¹ public disclosure becoming mandatory as a result of the Resolution passed by the Supreme Court in 2025.

Analysis of the mandatory disclosure requirement

Although the mandatory public disclosure of Judges’ assets is a welcome step towards transparency and public confidence in the judiciary, certain questions must be addressed.¹² Firstly, this Resolution only applies to sitting Supreme Court Judges, while High Court Judges are meant to submit details of their assets to their respective Chief Justice, with public disclosure of the same being voluntary, thus rare. According to reports, as of 1-3-2025, only 97 out of 770 Judges¹³ of all High Courts have declared their assets to the public. It is common knowledge that majority of litigants approach the lower courts first, followed by the High Courts and Supreme Court, and the same is reflected in the number of cases pending across the hierarchy of courts in India. According to data, the District Courts in India have a total of 46,30,480 pending cases in 2025¹⁴ whereas the Supreme Court has a relatively lesser number of 5558 pending cases.¹⁵

Second, the nature of property that Judges have disclosed include real estate i.e. immovable property; investments, including shares, mutual funds, fixed deposits, bonds, insurance, public provident funds and general provident funds; movable property, including jewellery and vehicles; and liabilities such as loans. However, any under-the-table dealings are usually carried out through untraceable means such as cash and/or benami properties, and very rarely, if ever, through traceable assets, making tracking difficult. Even in the Justice Varma case, the allegations of corruption were based on large amounts of unaccounted cash found on the Judge’s property and not based on any other assets. This raises the question of whether disclosure of trackable assets would really solve the issue of corruption (if any) in the judiciary.

Third, public disclosure of Judges’ assets could lead to the undesirable consequence of compromising the dignity of sitting Judges, especially at the apex level. Ever since the Supreme Court Judges published details of their assets on the Supreme Court website, there has been an immense amount of media and public scrutiny, of their assets and net worth, to the extent that the media has pitted Judges against each other financially. For instance, less than a week since the disclosure of assets, several publications carried out articles bearing headlines like “How rich are Supreme Court Judges in India….”¹⁶ and “From luxury flats to gold jewellery….”¹⁷ wherein articles not only analysed Judges’ investment portfolios with opinions about certain portfolios being “conservative”,¹⁸ but also engaged in indirectly comparing the luxury apartment of a Judge with a two-bedroom flat of another Judge.¹⁹ Such use of information disclosed by the judiciary blurs the boundaries between the public and sitting Judges. This begs the question regarding the ethical use of information published by the Judges and responsibility on the part of the media while using the information.

Conclusion

The Supreme Court’s Resolution mandating public disclosure of Judges’ assets is a laudable move regarding judicial accountability and transparency, after a history of inadequate measures that made such disclosure purely voluntary. However, the measure appears to be a knee-jerk reaction to the allegations of corruption made against Justice Yashwant Varma. To turn the Resolution into a truly effective step towards increased accountability among the entire judiciary, it would require certain fine-tuning to close the existing loopholes.

The present Resolution states that whenever a Supreme Court Judge acquires property of a “substantial” nature, it must be disclosed. However, “substantial” has not been defined. Perhaps, a minimum monetary threshold could be set out to clarify this ambiguity. The Resolution must also go beyond the Supreme Court and apply to High Courts and lower courts to build trust even at the lower tier of the judiciary. Further, the Supreme Court must publish guidelines regarding media reporting and usage of information regarding Judges’ assets. For this, the Supreme Court can take a leaf out of its own judgment in Swapnil Tripathi v. Supreme Court of India²⁰, wherein it had outlined detailed guidelines about public broadcasting of court proceedings. Swapnil Tripathi judgment²¹ highlighted the importance of a robust regulatory framework to balance the public’s right to access court proceedings and the litigants’ right to privacy.²² The same balance needs to be drawn vis-à-vis judicial accountability and transparency and Judges’ privacy and dignity.

The Resolution is hopefully the first in a series of measures, at multiple levels, that will be taken by the judiciary to address the issue of corruptions allegations against and an erosion of public trust in the judicial system of India, to bring back the glory and dignity of India’s halls of justice and justice-enablers.