NEW DELHI: With an aim to bring the pendency of cases down at Supreme Court, Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi has identified as many as 900 cases in the defective category, which have piled up over the last ten years and can’t be heard.
The defective cases are those which are not ready to be heard in wake of certain procedures, which are mandatory for filing a petition in the top court. However, neither the litigants involved nor the lawyers who had signed on these petitions have bothered to correct the mistakes in the filing of these petitions. They remain literally abandoned.
As of July 2019, the Supreme Court has 59,695 pending cases. Of these, 13,563 are either incomplete or are not ready cases, meaning these cases, both miscellaneous and regular ones, have defects which make them unfit to be listed for hearing before a judicial bench.
The Supreme Court Registry has now identified 900 cases wherein petitioners have not cleared the defects and these cases are pending since 2010 and some are older than that.
According to sources, another aim of segregating these cases is to stop listing them at two places simultaneously, meaning few litigants move apex court challenging a trial court order and then don’t clear the defects in the case as pointed by the registry.
They prefer to take relief at the trial court by stating that the case is pending at the top court.
“We have come across some such instances and informed the CJI about it. We decided to weed out such cases from the system so that our pendency figures come down significantly,” the official added.
All parties concerned have been given four weeks to cure the defects in their petitions, failing which the cases would be dismissed, thereby closing doors on all legal remedies.
