New Delhi: The Delhi high court is so behind in its work that it could take up to 466 years to clear the enormous backlog, the court's chief justice said in a damning report that illustrates the decrepitude of the country's judicial system.

The Delhi high court races through each case in an average of four minutes and 55 seconds but still has tens of thousands of cases pending, including upward of 600 that are more than 20 years old, according to the report.

The problems of the high court, which hears civil, criminal, and constitutional cases, is more the standard than the exception in India.

The United Nations Development Programme says some 20 million legal cases are pending in India. "It's a completely collapsed system," said Prashant Bhushan, a well known lawyer in New Delhi. "This country only lives under the illusion that there is a judicial system."

One reason for the delays is that there aren't enough sitting judges. For a country of 1.1 billion people, there are approximately 11 judges for million people compared to roughly 110 per million in the United States.

The justice ministry last year called for an increase of 50 judges per million people by 2013, but it was unclear how the government would pay for such a massive overhaul.

The Delhi high court, the state's top court, had 32 judges in 2007 and 2008 instead of the allotted 48, according to the chief justice's annual report, released Tuesday.

The court had at least 629 civil cases and 17 criminal cases pending that were more than 20 years old as of March 2008. Though that's an improvement from April 2007 when the court had 882 civil and 428 criminal cases pending that were that old.

Chief justice AP Shah said in the report that "it would take the court approximately 466 years" to clear the pending 2,300 criminal appeals cases alone.