"Every time I visit the court hoping that my name will be cleared, all I receive is another date," lamented Shinde.

On January 31, 2008 Pune labour court had a backlog of 4,903 cases. Since then, it would have added another 100 cases as the thumb rule is that each day one fresh case is added to the list of pending cases. Against this, the average number of cases cleared is at the rate of around 18 cases a month. Now, there are three labour courts in the city.

With only three judges, there seems no hope whittling down the huge pile-up of pending cases unless the number of judges were to go up dramatically. But this is unlikely to happen soon. A comparative estimate of cases filed from September till January this year reveals that the pendency in the three existing Labour Courts has increased from 4,662 to 4,903 matters in the interim months.

The first labour court , which had 1,966 matters, is currently dealing with 2,054 cases at present. The number of ongoing cases in the second court has increased from 1,715 to 1804 while 63 more cases have been added to the 982 matters that were on the active file of the third labour court in September.

“On an average, a new case gets registered in each of the three courts a day. However, not more than five cases actually come up during the day for argument, while the remaining are posted for other days,” said president of Pune Labour Law Practitioner’s Association (PLLPA) Advocate Atul Dixit. Association’s vice president, Zakir Attar also claimed that the high rate of filing of new matters — especially those referred by the Labour Commissioner's office — had led to bigger lists and pendency of matters, which necessitated setting up of new courts. The association had sent a proposal to the president of Industrial Court of Maharashtra in September, requesting an additional labour court.