India's Supreme Court has ordered High Courts across the country to deliver judgments within three months of reserving a case, addressing a longstanding practice in which judges have sometimes held reserved judgments for well over a year. A bench led by Justice Surya Kanta also ruled that bail orders must ideally be pronounced the following day and communicated to jails immediately, with undertrial prisoners released the same day or the next. The ruling matters because it introduces binding timelines where none previously existed in law, and stipulates that cases will be reassigned to a different bench if the guidelines are not followed.