Supreme Court of India: Jurisdiction and Powers

By Dooit UPSC expert · 28 July 2026 · 12 min read

The Supreme Court of India is established under Article 124 and stands at the apex of a single, integrated judiciary. It is the guardian of the Constitution and the highest court of appeal, and it exercises five jurisdictions — original, writ, appellate, advisory and review. Master those five, add judicial review and a handful of enabling Articles, and you have covered almost everything the exam asks about this institution.

In three decades of mentoring aspirants I have noticed a strange blind spot. Candidates learn the President, Parliament, the Governor and the CAG cold — and then treat the judiciary as a vague cloud of famous cases. That is a mistake. The Supreme Court is one of the most reliably tested institutions in the entire Polity syllabus, and unlike current affairs it barely changes from year to year. The Article numbers are fixed, the jurisdictions are finite, and the landmark ideas are countable on your fingers. This is high-yield, low-volatility territory. Let us treat it like the strategist you are meant to become.

The constitutional foundation: Article 124

The Supreme Court occupies Articles 124 to 147 in Part V of the Constitution. The single most important of these is Article 124(1), which creates the Court and states that it shall consist of a Chief Justice of India and "such number of other Judges as Parliament may by law prescribe." Notice the design choice here: the framers fixed the existence of the Court in the Constitution but left its size to ordinary law, so that the strength could grow with the caseload without a constitutional amendment. That single sentence is the reason the 2026 expansion, which we come to shortly, needed only a Bill and not an amendment.

Everything else about the judges follows from the same Part. Before you memorise anything, fix this compact profile of a Supreme Court judge in your head — it answers most factual questions at a glance.

A word on removal, because aspirants routinely garble it. The Constitution never uses the word "impeachment" for judges; that is loose journalistic shorthand. The correct phrase is removal on the ground of proved misbehaviour or incapacity, and the detailed procedure — the motion, the three-member inquiry committee, the special majority in each House — is laid down in the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968. To date no Supreme Court judge has actually been removed by this route, which is itself a favourite Prelims-trap fact.

The collegium system and the NJAC story

Read Article 124 literally and it sounds simple: the President appoints judges after "consultation" with the Chief Justice and other judges. The reality is more interesting, and it is one of the most examinable stories in Indian polity. Through a trio of judgments known as the Three Judges Cases, the Supreme Court reinterpreted "consultation" to mean effective "concurrence", and built the collegium system — a body of the Chief Justice and the senior-most judges who recommend appointments and transfers of judges to the higher judiciary. The word "collegium" appears nowhere in the Constitution; it is judge-made.

In 2014 Parliament tried to replace it. The 99th Constitutional Amendment created the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) to give the executive and civil society a formal role in appointments. In 2015, in the case popularly called the Fourth Judges Case, the Supreme Court struck down both the amendment and the NJAC Act as violative of judicial independence, which it held to be part of the basic structure. So the collegium survives — criticised for opacity, defended for insulation. When an examiner asks you to "critically examine the appointment of judges", this is the debate they want: independence versus accountability. Learn to argue both sides.

The five jurisdictions of the Supreme Court

Here is the heart of the topic, and the part most worth over-learning. The jurisdiction of the Supreme Court is not one thing but five distinct hats it wears, each anchored to specific Articles. Get the table below into your permanent memory.

Two nuances separate a careful candidate from a careless one. First, the original jurisdiction under Article 131 is about federal disputes between governments; it is distinct from Article 32, which is also original but concerns the enforcement of Fundamental Rights for ordinary citizens. Both are "original", but for very different reasons — a classic statement-matching trap. Second, the Special Leave Petition under Article 136 is discretionary and extraordinarily wide: it is why almost any matter in the country can, in theory, reach the Supreme Court. Dr B.R. Ambedkar called Article 32 the "heart and soul" of the Constitution; you should be able to quote that line and explain why.

Judicial review and the enabling Articles

Judicial review — the power to test the constitutional validity of laws and executive actions and to strike down whatever offends the Constitution — is the Supreme Court's most consequential function. It is not written in a single tidy clause; it flows from Articles 13, 32 and 226 read together. In the Kesavananda Bharati case (1973) the Court held that judicial review is part of the basic structure and cannot be abolished even by a constitutional amendment. That is why judicial review, the basic structure doctrine and the amendment power are three sides of the same triangle in Mains answers.

Four more Articles round off the Court's authority, and each is a ready Prelims one-liner:

• Article 129 — the Supreme Court is a court of record, with power to punish for contempt of itself.
• Article 141 — the law declared by the Supreme Court is binding on all courts within India. This is the constitutional basis of judicial precedent.
• Article 142 — the Court may pass any order necessary for doing "complete justice" in a matter before it; a wide, and sometimes controversial, power.
• Article 144 — all civil and judicial authorities in India must act in aid of the Supreme Court.

The growth of the Court — and the 2026 change

Because Article 124 left the Court's size to Parliament, its strength has climbed steadily with the country's litigation. It began in 1950 with a Chief Justice and seven judges — eight in all — and has been enlarged by successive amendments to the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Act, 1956, reaching 31 judges in 2009 and 34 in 2019.

The current-affairs hook you must carry into the exam is this: the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Ordinance, 2026, promulgated on 16 May 2026, raised the sanctioned strength from 34 to 38 — the Chief Justice of India plus 37 other judges, up from the earlier 33. The Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Bill, 2026, introduced in the Lok Sabha on 20 July 2026, seeks to replace that ordinance and put the higher strength on a permanent statutory footing. The stated aim is faster disposal of a mounting backlog. For the exam, the takeaway is conceptual, not just numerical: the Court's size is a matter of ordinary legislation, so it can be — and repeatedly has been — expanded without touching the Constitution.

How this is actually asked — Prelims vs Mains

Prelims tests the skeleton with surgical precision: which Article establishes the Court (124), which grants advisory jurisdiction (143), what "court of record" means (129), the removal ground and procedure, the current strength. These are pure factual hooks, and the table-driven approach above is built to nail them. The trap is always a swapped Article number or a confused jurisdiction, so drill the pairings until they are automatic.

Mains asks you to argue. Judicial review versus parliamentary sovereignty. The collegium versus the NJAC. Judicial activism spilling into judicial overreach under Article 142. The independence of the judiciary as basic structure. Here the examiner wants a balanced, sourced position — not a list. A strong answer names the relevant Article, cites the landmark case in one clause, gives the argument on both sides, and closes with a measured view. That is the difference between a candidate who has memorised the judiciary and one who understands it.

If you want to see how these ideas connect across the syllabus, read our companion guides on the basic structure doctrine, the writs under Articles 32 and 226, the Fundamental Rights, and the amendment process under Article 368. The judiciary sits at the intersection of all four — which is precisely why it is so heavily tested.

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