Govt blames judiciary for judges’ vacancies

The Union government has passed the buck to the superior judiciary on the malnourished strength of judges in the high courts and the Supreme Court.

“The main reason for the large number of vacant posts is that the government has not received sufficient proposals to fill up these vacant posts,” law minister Salmam Khurshid has told parliament
Khurshid’s statement assumes significance in the backdrop of the fact that the Union government has been voicing its concern regarding the inefficacy of the judges’ selection process through ‘collegium’ of judges of HCs and SC.

It had proposed amending the law to retrieve the power to select judges that had been taken away from it by the top court in 1993.
While the judiciary has been blaming the government for being stingy in allocating sufficient funds to revamp the brittle infrastructure for judiciary that’s reeling under the compounding burden of about three crore cases, the minister has listed the monetary allocations made for the providing e-justice that could shed the whopping backlog in a small time.

According to official sources, out of the 895 sanctioned posts of judges in 21 high courts, 291 are lying vacant. Similarly, the posts for as many as 3170 judges are vacant in the lower courts. The top court is also awaiting filling up two vacant seats.

India suffers from a pathetically low judge-population ratio, 14.5 million population to 50 judges.

It’s learnt that UK has 51 judges per million population and the US had 110 judges per million. However, the gravity of vacant judges’ posts has been attributed to the infrequent meetings by collegiums.