NEW DELHI: With just a month left for the retirement of present Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi, he has initiated the process for appointment of Justice Sharad Arvind Bobde as the next CJI.
Chief Justice has gone by the convention to recommend the name of the next senior judge after him as his successor.
According to sources, CJI has written a letter to the Centre recommending Justice Bobde as his successor.
If the recommendation is cleared by the Central government, Justice Bobde will be administered the oath of office by President Ram Nath Kovind on November 18 as the 47th CJI.
Justice Bobde will have a tenure of 18 months as CJI till April 23, 2021.
Justice Bobde was former Chief Justice of Madhya Pradesh High Court and is also serving as the Chancellor of Maharashtra National Law University, Mumbai and Maharashtra National Law University, Nagpur.
Justice Bobde hails from Maharashtra and studied law at Nagpur University. His grandfather and father were lawyers and practiced law at the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court.
He had initially enrolled as an advocate in 1978 and practised at the Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court and then became a senior advocate in 1998. Justice Bobde was appointed as an additional judge of the Bombay High Court on March 29, 2000, and was elevated as the judge of the Supreme Court on April 12, 2013.
Justice Bobde has a tenure of eight years in the Supreme Court and has been involved in many important cases including the Ayodhya temple-mosque dispute, the Aadhaar case, the right to life judgment the g BCCI case and petitions against firecrackers to name a few.
Justice Bobde also headed the in-house committee which probed the allegations of sexual harassment against CJI Ranjan Gogoi and gave him a clean chit in the case.