In this episode of the LAOT Podcast, Arnav Mathur speaks with Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, former Chief Justice of India, about the deep structural fault lines running through the Indian judiciary, from the district courts to the Supreme Court collegium. The conversation charts the widening gap between the constitutional promise of accessible justice and the everyday reality of litigants navigating a system built around lawyers, judges, and the state rather than the people it is meant to serve. Together, they examine the true drivers of India's crore-scale case backlog, unpacking how delay, opaque procedure, and a culture of adjournments impose both economic and human costs far beyond simplistic narratives of "too many cases, too few judges." They trace the promise and limits of the e-Courts digitisation drive, from NSTEP and e-Sewa Kendras to the risk of a digital divide that leaves the most under-resourced litigants and lawyers further behind. The discussion turns to the district judiciary, dissecting flawed performance metrics that reward volume over complexity, the contentious reinstatement of the three-year practice rule, and the case for an All India Judicial Service. Finally, they interrogate the collegium system itself, Chandrachud's frank admission of its institutional blind spots, the absence of data-driven evaluation, the informal role government already plays, and the quiet, undisclosed logic behind judicial transfers. }Throughout, the conversation returns to a central thesis: that reform is less about adding new mechanisms than about redesigning the system around the litigant's experience, and about building the institutional trust that has eroded in its absence.