Exactly 40 years after having his first brush with the judiciary as an advocate, Justice P Sathasivam took oath as the 40th Chief Justice of India and began his nine-month-stint with the heavy task of lessening a monstrous pendency and large vacancies in high courts.
President Pranab Mukherjee administered the oath of office to Justice Sathasivam at a function in Rashtrapati Bhavan’s Darbar Hall. Those present included Vice-President Hamid Ansari, PM Manmohan Singh, Congress president Sonia Gandhi and BJP leaders L K Advani, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley.
Justice Sathasivam rushed from Rashtrapati Bhavan to the Supreme Court to preside over a three-judge bench, which had several matters on the hearing list.
The primary task for anyone at the helm of affairs of the three-tier justice delivery system is to free it from the pendency of three crore cases. “Backlog of cases is the bottlenecks for delivering prompt justice,” he says.
Justice Sathasivam has radical ideas to tackle the problem. He wants to categorize cases based on the year of filing and assign them to courts with instructions to clear them within a specific time span. During the period of tackling backlog, these courts would not be assigned new cases. For this, he will soon hold discussions with judges of the Supreme Court, high court chief justices, CMs and the Union government for creation of more courts and appointment of judges.
With a large number of posts of judges in HCs lying vacant, the new CJI will get a chance to implement his idea of giving adequate representation to women and members of backward classes, who he says must meet the minimum criteria, in the higher judiciary.
President Pranab Mukherjee administered the oath of office to Justice Sathasivam at a function in Rashtrapati Bhavan’s Darbar Hall. Those present included Vice-President Hamid Ansari, PM Manmohan Singh, Congress president Sonia Gandhi and BJP leaders L K Advani, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley.
Justice Sathasivam rushed from Rashtrapati Bhavan to the Supreme Court to preside over a three-judge bench, which had several matters on the hearing list.
The primary task for anyone at the helm of affairs of the three-tier justice delivery system is to free it from the pendency of three crore cases. “Backlog of cases is the bottlenecks for delivering prompt justice,” he says.
Justice Sathasivam has radical ideas to tackle the problem. He wants to categorize cases based on the year of filing and assign them to courts with instructions to clear them within a specific time span. During the period of tackling backlog, these courts would not be assigned new cases. For this, he will soon hold discussions with judges of the Supreme Court, high court chief justices, CMs and the Union government for creation of more courts and appointment of judges.
With a large number of posts of judges in HCs lying vacant, the new CJI will get a chance to implement his idea of giving adequate representation to women and members of backward classes, who he says must meet the minimum criteria, in the higher judiciary.
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