MADURAI: The Madurai Bench of Madras High Court has instructed the registry of all courts across Tamil Nadu and Puducherry to ensure that contact details like name, residential address, mobile number, email ID, etc., are clearly mentioned in case documents at the time of filing cases.
Justice SM Subramaniam gave the instruction while hearing a petition filed on December 15 last year. The petitioner's advocate told the court that the petitioner had been trying to serve appeal notice to the opposite party for the past three months, but is unable to trace their address.
Hearing the plea, the judge observed that a large number of civil cases (miscellaneous petitions and the second appeals) are pending for years together for want of serving notices to the opposite parties. "This is because the plaint and appeal suit do not contain correct addresses of the parties, as the original suits are filed before the trial court," he added. He opined that if such delays continue, litigants would lose faith in the judiciary.
Pointing out that Order 7 Rule 1 of the Civil Procedure Code (CPC) states that a plaint should contain all details, including name of the court, name and description of the residence of the plaintiff and defendant, among others, the judge said this rule should be followed strictly by mentioning the contact details in a legible manner.
He also added that a self-attested copy of the Aadhaar card could be enclosed at the time of filing case documents. "Insufficient or unclear address should not be entertained in the plaint and all those plaints are to be returned by the court registry itself," he said.
The judge instructed the Registry of High Court to forward the order to all courts in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry to ensure strict compliance.