With the passing of the baton at India’s top court, it will be interesting to see if Chief Justice J S Khehar follows the same measures that his predecessor, former Chief Justice T S Thakur, had taken to cut down the pendency. At present, over 60,000 cases are pending at the Supreme Court.
Former CJI Thakur took various initiatives in his one-year tenure and began with setting up of six three-judge benches, which sat exclusively to decide the cases which needed to be referred to a larger bench and this resulted in hundreds of cases disposed of in a single go.
CJI Khehar, known for his no-nonsense approach in court, gives no adjournment, and expects lawyers appearing before him to be prepared with arguments as he himself puts a lot of efforts in studying the cases prior to hearing.
Justice Thakur constituted two exclusive benches of five judges to deal with constitutional matters, each of which sat on miscellaneous days. With this, as many as 10 such cases have been decided, cutting pendency in matters warranting constitutional guidance.
Special benches were set up to dispose of pending tax matters relating to bail. Consequently, 112 tax matters and 119 bail matters had been disposed of.
Moreover, vacation benches were set up to dispose of old and urgent matters. During the summer vacation, old regular matters were listed and many of them got disposed of as well.
CJI Khehar has now called an administrative meeting next week to carry out reforms in registry of the apex court which will ease the filing procedure, thus reducing unwanted delay in scheduling the case after its filing.
Just before Justice Thakur’s retirement, he had passed the order in the entry tax case, due to which 1,240 cases got disposed of at the apex court and similar such cases pending at high courts too would be settled in the process.