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I can’t let apex court split: Chief justice

Chief justice of India (CJI )KG Balakrishnan has shot down the government’s plan to divide the Supreme Court into four divisions — north, south, east and west.

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Chief justice of India KG Balakrishnan has shot down the government’s proposal to divide the Supreme Court into four divisions — north, south, east, and west.

"I can’t disintegrate the Supreme Court,’’ he declared while attending the annual RK Jain Memorial Trust lecture here today on ‘Towards Holistic Restructuring of the Supreme Court’.

The chief justice is concerned about the mounting arrears of cases in the apex court: there is a 10-12% annual increase in cases and a whopping 1.25 lakh to 1.30 lakh cases waiting for justice. “We have real problems… we can neither minimise the filing of cases nor refuse to hear them," he said.

But dividing the top court with a main bench at Delhi to adjudicate on matters of constitutional importance isn’t the answer to the problem, maintained the chief justice. He, however, suggested the setting up of an “appellate forum" for gradually eliminating undue delays in the dispensation of cases.

Lawyer and Congressman Abhishek Manu Singhvi too dismissed the idea of setting up more benches of the Supreme Court as a “scourge that the SC can’t afford to bear”. He wanted the enactment of the judicial impact law and speedy disposal of cases.

The convener of the RKJM Trust, Manoj Goel, said that dividing the apex court into four would be a “dangerous proposition".

The lecture provided an interesting forum for judicial experts to debate some of the issues that are currently raising a lot of heat. Former chief justice of India RC Lahoti, for instance, was scathing in his assessment of the quality of high court judges. He bluntly said the selection quality had slipped in the past decade. He also said the quality of some high court judgments was inferior. In such cases, he said, the apex court cannot close its eyes to the gross injustice done by the judges.

He suggested that the retirement age of high court judges should be increased to 65, on a par with Supreme Court judges. This could ensure that the chief justices do not look to opportunities in the top court for an extension of their tenure. “They are kings in the state kingdom. Once they come to Delhi, they become tenants,” he quipped, maintaining that not many chief justices hanker for elevation.

Eminent lawyer KK Venugopal had recently pointed out that senior lawyers charge anywhere between Rs1 lakh and Rs3 lakh for a single appearance and that it was unfair that litigants lost this money due to adjournments. Referring to this remark, justice Lahoti said: “Venugopal has given only 10% of the fee charged. It’s far more.”

Speaking at the forum, Venugopal suggested the constitution of “courts of appeal” rather than addition of judges to the Supreme Court. He cited the figures collated by Yale Law School research fellow Nick Robinson: 10% of the cases filed come from Delhi, 6.2% from Punjab and Haryana and Uttarakhand, and between 1.1% and 2.4 % from the larger southern states. This, he said, proved that the southern states suffered from reduced access to the apex court.

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