The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : High Court facing acute shortage of judges: Katju

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Mar 10, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

High Court facing acute shortage of judges: Katju

By Our Staff Reporter

MADURAI, MARCH 9. The Chief Justice of the Madras High Court, Markandey Katju, today said the High Court was facing "acute shortage of judges."

"In Mumbai, out of the sixty judges, 56 are functioning. In Kerala, all vacancies are filled up. On the other hand, out of the sanctioned strength of 49 judges, we have only half of them and the reasons are known," he said.

The Chief Justice was delivering his presidential address at a function held for handing over allotment orders for the lawyers' chambers in the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court. Commending the work done by the chamber allotment committee, he pointed out the committee chairman, Justice M. Karpagavinayagam, and members, Justice P. Sathasivam and Justice C. Nagappan, could not participate in the function because of shortage of judges in the principal seat in Chennai.

At present, the Madras High Court has 25 judges of whom five are posted in the Madurai Bench on a rotational basis for a period of two months.

Mr. Katju also said the judges and advocates were servants of public and amenities like chambers and other infrastructure facilities were being provided to them only to assist in delivering speedy and high quality justice.

In his address, Justice P.K. Misra called upon the advocates to provide quality assistance to judges to deliver good judgments.

"Without real contribution from the lawyers, any judgment of the judge would not be good enough," he said.

Justice D. Murugesan, Justice R. Banumathy and Justice A.R. Ramlaingam participated.

Chambers allotted

Later, the Chief Justice handed over the chamber allotment orders to K. Vellaisamy, president of the Madurai Bar Association, K.P. Thiyagarajan, secretary, Madras High Court Madurai Bench Advocates Association, F. Muthukrishnan, president, Madurai Bench High Court Advocates Association, Isaac Mohanlal, president of the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court Bar Association, and Nisha Banu, president, Madras High Court Madurai Bench Women Lawyers Association.

S. Palanivelu, Registrar (Administration) and V. Periyakaruppiah, Registrar (Judicial) spoke.

Out of the 108 chambers, 92 have been allotted to the advocates and the rest are yet to be allotted.

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