New Delhi: Thousands of soldiers and veterans are waiting years for their service and pension disputes to be resolved, but the numbers cited in parliament understate how big the backlog really is. The military is publicly feted and celebrated, but the everyday disputes of soldiers and veterans languish unresolved.This came to light when RTI activist and director, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, Venkatesh Nayak compared year-wise case figures tabled by the Union law ministry for the Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT) in Parliament with records he obtained directly from the tribunal under the Right to Information (RTI) Act.Image 1: Parliament response by ministry of law and justice to pending and disposed cases in tribunals; December 5, 2025 in Lok Sabha. Serial No. 13 relates to the Armed Forces Tribunal. Source: Lok Sabha Q&A, Winter Session, 2025Data shared by the law ministry in parliament on December 5, 2025, showed 6,904 cases pending before the AFT in 2025 (image 1, above). The RTI application filed by Nayak, eliciting records from the same tribunal, shows a cumulative pendency of nearly 28,000 cases as of September 2025 (see image 3 above).The backlog matters because the AFT adjudicates service disputes, pensions, disability claims and court-martial appeals: prolonged pendency means delayed outcomes that directly impact soldiers, veterans and their families.Both the scale of the backlog uncovered by Nayak and its impact become clearer over time. Parliamentary records show that the AFT had 18,829 pending cases in February 2021, but that figure has risen steadily since then. All this time, official replies in parliament presented only limited, year-wise snapshots of the pending cases – rather than cumulative totals.Image 2: Cumulative pendency at the Armed Forces Tribunal. Source: Lok Sabha Q&A, ministry of defence response, March 10, 2021.This has even led to confusion in the press about the actual status of cases waiting in the AFT. Some media outlets have reported the number from December 5, 2025 (6,904 pending cases) as the cumulative total – when the actual cumulative backlog is roughly four times higher (see image 2, above: parliament response; and image 3, below: AFT’s response).There is a gap in the data presented in parliament because the law ministry’s replies only share year-wise disposal and pending figures from 2020 onwards. The replies do not disclose the backlog built up since the tribunal’s inception in 2009. That is another reason why it is easy to misread the single-year numbers as total pendency.This RTI was filed by Nayak on August 12, 2025, and the tribunal’s response followed on September 16, 2025. But securing this data was not straightforward. The information was shared, no doubt, and it included the cumulative backlog. However, the AFT initially refused to share some of the data, saying it was not available in the format requested (see image 6, below).Image 3: Response from the Armed Forces Tribunal to Venkatesh Nayak’s RTI application, providing cumulative details of pendency at the tribunal on September 16, 2025. Source: Venkatesh NayakHowever, on first appeal, Nayak’s application was forwarded by the AFT to its other benches. That bench-specific data, according to Nayak, is still incomplete, as individual benches are in the process of sharing that information.The parliamentary disclosures themselves are not consistent over time: while a 2021 reply provided a cumulative pendency figure for the Armed Forces Tribunal, the 2025 reply from the law and justice ministry is limited to year-wise snapshots, which does not share the overall backlog of cases.The 2021 response was provided by the Ministry of Defence, and it showed a backlog of 18,829 cases as of February 28, 2021 – the last time cumulative pendency was reported by the government. In other words, with four more years of accumulation of pending cases by December 2025, the AFT, in response to Nayak’s RTI, reported 27,900-plus cases.Taken together, government data presented in parliament is either complete in scope without detail – or detailed without complete scope. And the AFT’s data adds yet another layer of complexity to this picture, as this data tracks cases across all benches from the tribunal’s inception to September 2025 – 27,962 in all.One might think the differences in responses are due to variations in the questions asked. However, that is not the case. The March 2021 question raised in Lok Sabha by Col. Rajyavardhan Rathore (Retd.) was AFT-specific, sought bench-wise pendency of cases, and reasons for delay. It was a snapshot-style query, and it received similar answer.The question asked earlier this month in parliament by Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha, Arun Nehru of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) was about disposal and pendency in major tribunals since 2020, and includes figures for other tribunals, not just the AFT.In his RTI application, Nayak asked for year-wise admissions and disposals from inception, current bench-wise pendency, the number of years cases have been pending (the age of pendency) and also details of the budget of the AFT. This granular data also received a granular response. However, what wasn’t provided was year-wise and bench-wise cumulative records from 2009 to September 2025 for all benches. Nor were bench-wise totals provided, on grounds of variance in record-keeping at the AFT.Image 4: Vacant positions in the Armed Forces Tribunal. Source: AFT response to Venkatesh Nayak’s RTI applicationThe core issue here is that when the three data sets are read side-by-side, the parliamentary figure most visible to readers – 6,904 – captures only a slice of what the AFT itself says is pending (around 28,000 cases).Further, the divergence is not limited to pendency figures alone. A comparison of year-wise disposal data shows that the number of cases the AFT reported as disposed of under RTI does not always match the annual disposal figures cited by the law ministry in parliament for the same years, indicating inconsistencies even in basic case-flow data.For instance, while the law ministry told parliament that the AFT disposed of 2,460 cases in 2020 and 6,140 cases in 2021, data disclosed by the tribunal under RTI shows that only 1,939 cases were disposed of in 2020 and 4,178 cases in 2021.Across multiple years, the law ministry’s disposal figures differ from the tribunal’s own records – for example, parliament cited 9,653 disposals in 2023 compared with 9,322 reported by the AFT, and 7,706 in 2024 compared with the tribunal’s figure of 7,793.Image 5: Disposal of cases according to the Armed Forces Tribunal, as of September 16, 2025. Source: Responses from AFT to Venkatesh Nayak’s RTI application“It is very intriguing that there is a starkly visible discrepancy between the disposal and pendency figures tabled by the government in parliament and what the AFT itself has disclosed under RTI. Surely, the government sourced this data from the AFT through the Ministry of Law and Justice. At what stage and why did the figures get changed is a question that the minister who signed off on the reply should explain,” Nayak told The Wire.Such partial or variable presentation of the data over the years in Parliament leads to a systematic understatement of the backlog as well as disposal – primarily what Nayak’s RTI request has unmasked.“Parliament has the right to know accurate data and the government has the obligation to respect and fulfill it. I hope the DMK MP and others in Opposition parties will take up this matter seriously and demand accountability from the government,” Nayak said.The data tells very different stories about the scale of pending as well as resolved cases. Therefore, even if none of them are strictly “false” or “inaccurate”, the question arises, which one of them is reliable? At the very least, this is an instance where data, when incomplete, can shape public understanding – especially through media reports – very differently.Image 6: ‘For rest of your queries… CPI is not required to create new information or provide interpretation…’ Source: Armed Forces Tribunal in response to Venkatesh Nayak’s RTI applicationThis is not just a matter of what citizens “know”, but of utilisation of resources too.After all, the backlog of cases in the AFT has grown even as spending on this tribunal has increased every year. The budget and expenditure records (also retrieved by Nayak from Union Budget documents of various years) show that the tribunal’s annual expenditure rose from Rs 20.68 crore in 2012-2013 to Rs 48.22 crore in 2022-2023. In 2025-26, the budget estimate (BE) was over Rs 56 crore, slightly over the Rs 54 crore BE in 2023-2024.This naturally raises questions about the capacity of the AFT to resolve cases, but there is yet another layer to this data. The parliament question answered in March 2021 included details of vacant positions in the AFT, which have a direct bearing on its capacity to function. At the time, 23 of the 34 sanctioned posts (nearly 70%) across AFT benches were vacant – coinciding with a sharp rise in pendency during the pandemic years (see image 4, above, on vacancies and image 5, above, on disposal).This meant that several benches were functioning with one or no members, and some benches could not function at full strength. The period of highest vacancies was 2020-2021, when parliamentary data and RTI details both show lower disposal numbers, contributing to rising pendency. Cases not disposed in a particular year are rolled over to the next year, from 18,829 to almost 28,000 in four years.What is more, when 23 of the tribunal’s posts were vacant, case disposals fell sharply – from 6,575 in 2019 to just 1,939 in 2020 – adding to the backlog that has grown by nearly 50%: from 18,829 cases in early 2021 to about 28,000 by September 2025.The contrast is stark: even as the military is widely celebrated, thousands of soldiers and veterans are still waiting quietly for basic service and pension disputes to be resolved.