NEW DELHI: Amid demands for automation in hike in salaries of judges and Parliamentarians, Lok Sabha on Thursday gave its nod to a legislative proposal to enhance salaries of Supreme Court and 24 High Court judges almost two-fold. The Bill now awaits the Rajya Sabha nod, after which the Chief Justice of India will get a salary of Rs 2.80 lakh a month against the current Rs 1 lakh.
Chief Justices of High Courts and judges of the Supreme Court will get Rs 2.50 lakh a month against the current Rs 90,000. High Court judges will get a monthly salary of Rs 2.25 lakh, up from Rs 80,000 currently.
Pay day
Rs 2.8 lakh will be the CJI’s salary, up from Rs 1 lakh
Rs 2.5 lakh will be SC judges pay, up from Rs 90,000
BJD MP Tathagata Satpathy said, “It’s humiliating that Parliament should decide on the salaries of judges. It’s ironical that the secretary to the President gets more salary than the first citizen of the country. Former MP and RJD chief Lalu Prasad had once suggested that salaries of MPs should be Rs 1 higher than that of the Cabinet Secretary,” Satpathy said.
Trinamool Congress MP Kalyan Banerjee, a lawyer by profession, said the government should cut down on holidays in the judiciary, while stressing that the irony is that the rich people have faster access to justice than the poor. Banerjee called upon the government to weed out “dead woods” among judges. “If a High Court judge needs to be trained, why should he be a judge in the first place?” quipped Banerjee.