The Madras High Court has dispensed with the practice of clubbing main cases with interlocutory applications while declaring its disposal figures and has begun counting disposal of main cases alone for statistical purposes.
According to court sources, Chief Justice S.K. Kaul was of the view that including interlocutory applications, which get disposed of automatically on disposal of the main cases, in the disposal figures was not in conformity with the practice followed by other High Courts in the country.
Sources also point out that Justice A. Selvam, the only judge to be presiding over the proceedings in Madras High Court Bench here ever since his elevation as a High Court judge in 2006 without seeking a transfer to the Principal Seat in Chennai, had also taken a similar view last year.
While declaring the disposal statistics on July 2, a fortnight before the completion of 10 years since the inauguration of the Madurai Bench, the High Court Bench Registry here claimed that the Bench had disposed a whopping number of 6.24 lakh cases in a decade.
Taking exception to the figure, the judge released a revised statistics excluding the interlocutory applications and pointed out that the court had disposed of only 3.43 lakh out of 4.01 lakh main cases filed ever since its inauguration and that the rest of them were interlocutory applications.
Sources said that as per statistics prepared in accordance with the old method of calculating disposal figures, the Principal Seat of the High Court as well as the Madurai Bench had disposed of 1.10 lakh cases, as against institution of 1.42 cases between January and June 2014.
However, the figures got reduced by half when the new method was applied to calculate the disposal rate for the period between July and December 2014, when only 69, 202 cases were disposed of jointly by the principal seat as well as the Bench here as against the 76,957 cases filed during the period.
Of the 76,957 main petitions, instituted between July and December 2014, about 44,000 were civil cases and the rest criminal cases. Similarly, out of 69,202 cases disposed of by the court, over 35,000 were civil cases and about 33,000 criminal cases.
Judges’ strength
Stating that the court had achieved the fete with just 43 judges as against its sanctioned strength of 60 judges, the court officials doubted if the institution would be able to better its disposal figures this year since many more judges were due to retire and there were no signs of appointing new judges.
The new method takes into account only main cases and not interlocutory applications