Engaging India is a weekly online column analysing the issues, trends and forces behind the business and politics shaping India and its impact on the world, which appears on FT.com India, a dedicated online section on India. Engaging India appears every Thursday morning exclusively on FT.com India and is written by Jo Johnson, the Financial Times’ South Asia bureau chief; Amy Yee, New Delhi correspondent; and Joe Leahy, Mumbai correspondent.

Asked to rule on a land dispute that has been stuck in the Indian legal system for half a century, the Supreme Court this week finally snapped. Noting that the country’s courts had seized up beneath a backlog of millions of cases, many of them decades old, it expressed ”serious concern” for the rule of law in India. ”People in India are simply disgusted with this state of affairs and are fast losing faith in the judiciary because of the inordinate delay in disposal of cases,” the bench, consisting of Justices A. K. Mathur and Markandey Katju, said. For a country that never tires of describing itself as the world’s largest democracy, the court’s calamitous warning has come none too soon.