Research and analysis

Questions about Indian tax case law that are usually answered from impression, answered instead by counting. Every piece here is computed from the judgments on this database, and says which ones.

Citation analysis18 September 2026

The second most-cited authority in Indian tax litigation is a land acquisition case

Every judgment on this database was scanned for the authorities it relies on, and the references resolved into decisions. The result is a ranking nobody had counted before, and it is dominated at the top not by charging provisions but by the threshold questions of whether the Tribunal will hear an appeal at all.

  • 732,794 citations across 292,668 judgments, resolving to 26,763 distinct decisions
  • National Thermal Power v. CIT leads at 5,796 citing judgments; Collector, Land Acquisition v. Mst. Katiji — a land acquisition case — is second at 3,926
  • 1,000 decisions, under 4% of those ever cited, carry 46.5% of all citation weight
  • Roughly a quarter of citations are to decisions handed down before 2000; the 1970s alone are cited 30,485 times
  • Sections 147 and 148 outrank every charging provision by judgment count
  • 55% of judgments cite no reported authority at all
Read the full analysis →

How these figures are produced

Every judgment on BharatTax is scanned for the law-report citations it contains — references in the form 229 ITR 383 — and the case name in front of each. Those references are resolved into decisions rather than strings, so that a case reported in two series counts once and not twice, and a ranking by how often the corpus relies on a decision becomes possible.

Nothing here is generated from a model’s recollection of Indian tax law. The figures come from the corpus, and the decisions they point to have pages of their own:

  • Landmark cases — the full ranking, with the proposition each decision stands for and every judgment here that follows it.
  • Sections of the Act — the leading authorities on each provision, and the judgments applying it.
  • The judgments themselves — ITAT, High Court and Supreme Court decisions in full text.

A post’s figures are fixed at the date it carries and are not recomputed as the corpus grows, so that a number quoted from it stays checkable.