Supreme Court: The Court has directed all States, Union Territories (UTs) and the High Courts to apprise it on the status of vacancies of judicial officers as on June 30 and sought personal appearance of all State Law Secretaries and the Registrar Generals of HCs before it on July 31.
“The authorities shall indicate the total strength of each cadre; the number of posts in different cadres actually filled up; the number of posts in each cadre lying vacant; the number of posts in respect of which selection is presently going on and the stage of the said process of selection, and finally, the number of posts in different cadres for which the process of selection is yet to be initiated,”
The Court had, on October 22 last year, taken note of over 5,000 vacant posts of judicial officers in lower courts across the country and sought information from all the 24 High Courts as also states.
The bench of Ranjan Gogi, CJ and Deepak Gupta and Aniruddha Bose, JJ said,
“Regarding the issue of filling up of the vacancies in different cadres of the District and subordinate judicial services of the states and UTs, the concerned authority of the state governments/UTs and also the Registrar Generals of the jurisdictional High Courts shall inform the Secretary General of this court the position with regard to filling up of the vacancies in the judicial services in each state,”
The Law Secretaries of each State and the Registrar Generals of each High Courts shall be personally present in court on July 31, it said.
The bench also took note of a report dealing with the central funding on infrastructure of subordinate judiciary.
“Solicitor General (Tushar Mehta) is granted time until July 31 to interact with the concerned officials of the Union of India and to lay before the court the views of the Union of India with regard to the suggestions made by the Amicus Curiae (on infrastructure of lower courts),”
Earlier, the Court had termed the extent of vacancies in lower judicairy as “wholly unacceptable” and sought information from all the 24 High Courts on it. It had said there were 22,036 posts of higher and lower judicial officers in lower courts in the country and, as on date, 5,133 posts are vacant.
(Source: PTI)
