NEW DELHI: In a move which would help in weeding out defective cases pending in the Supreme Court since 2010, Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi has given two weeks’ time to 729 petitioners to clear the defects in their respective cases, failing which their cases will be dismissed.
This is a first-of-its-kind initiative by the CJI to cut down the number of pending cases, now at 57,346, which includes civil, criminal and constitutional cases.
“The Supreme Court is unnecessarily burdened with this. We will get rid of these petitions. Some of these petitions are in defect since 2010. Nine years have gone by but the defects have not been cured,” the bench observed.
When one of the advocates said they be given four weeks to cure the defects, the bench said it would dismiss the petitions if the defects were not cured within two weeks of Tuesday.
The Chief Justice of India, after taking oath in October last year, has also streamlined the mentioning process for lawyers and directed lawyers not to mention cases untimely as that takes a lot of time.
Before implementing the scheme, the Chief Justice of India had said, “I have settled new norms for listing of cases, which will ensure that every urgent matter comes up on the docket within four days of its filing, at the most five days. We are trying to get rid of urgent mentioning before the court, which unnecessarily takes away judicial time. The attempt is to do away with the practice of oral mentioning altogether.”
Usually, advocates make an oral mention of urgent cases before the Chief Justice’s bench and request an early hearing. The bench takes between 10 to 20 minutes daily for hearing urgent pleas by advocates.
Of the pending cases before the top court of the country, 13,257 cases are either “incomplete” or “not ready” cases.
What this means is that these cases, both miscellaneous and regular ones, have defects which make them unfit to be listed for hearing before a judicial bench.
Hearings: