The Centre on Tuesday appointed 24 judges to Allahabad and Calcutta High Courts to help overcome large scale vacancies in the higher judiciary causing cases to pile up in courts.
Issuing separate notifications, the law Ministry appointed 19 additional judges to the Allahabad High Court and five to the Calcutta High Court. The additional judges will have a tenure of two years and based on their performance would be elevated as permanent judges.
These are the first set of fresh appointments to the High Courts after a long time and the first after Justice Dipak Misra took over as Chief Justice of India on August 28. With the present appointments, the Allahabad High Court having an approved strength of 160 judges will have 91 functioning judges - still a shortage of 69.
The Calcutta High Court has an approved strength of 72 judges, but has a working strength of 31, short of 41 judges. The fresh lot of appointments has generated hope that over 61 recommendations made by 13 high courts will next be taken up by the Supreme Court collegium owing to the serious manpower crunch faced by the High Courts.
These recommendations include 36 names sent by eight high courts for appointment as judges and 25 names sent by five high courts for elevation of additional judges to permanent judges. The recommendations were sent to the SC collegium
during the tenure of former CJI JS Khehar.
The eight high courts from where names have been sent for fresh appointments include Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madras, Gujarat and Bombay, the functionary said. Besides these names, the SC collegium has to take a call on appointing chief justices in six high courts of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Calcutta, Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand and Manipur. These high courts are being headed by acting chief justices.
According to information provided by the Department of Justice, while the approved strength of judges in the 24 high courts is 1079 as on September 1, 2017, the high courts were functioning with an effective working strength of only 666 judges with a huge vacancy backlog of 413 posts.