Asserting that the increasing pendency was not because of the delay caused by judges in disposing of cases, Chief Justice of India T.S. Thakur said a single bench of the Supreme Court hears 89 cases per day, when the Supreme Court of the United States hears the same number of cases in a year.
Referring to a 1997 report of the Law Commission which states that the overall judges strength in the country should be 40,000, the CJI said, “Even now the total judges’ strength in the country is just 18000.”
Justice Thakur made the observations while delivering a special address in a Mediation Awareness Programme to Judicial Officers from Chennai, Kancheepuram, and Tiruvallur districts organised by the Tamil Nadu Mediation and Conciliation Centre (TNMCC), High Court of Madras in association with the Tamil Nadu State Judicial Academy (TNSJA). Stressing the need for frequent interactions between the judges of the lower judiciary and the judges of the high courts, the Chief Justice stated that the gap between the two levels must be reduced. He encouraged judicial officers present to refer litigations to mediation centres.
Earlier, speaking at the 50th year celebration of the C.P.Ramaswami Aiyar Foundation here, Justice Thakur said there was an urgent need to address the problem of militancy in Kashmir, the Maoist insurgency in the central and eastern states and separatist groups operating in Northeast with the required political consensus in the larger interests of the country.
“These threats in their diverse forms could, unless resolved, be antithetical to the progress India has made so far in the economic sphere,” he added. “The credit for my being here must entirely go to the distinguished lawyer Aryama Sundram (grandson of CPR). I have seen him persuade the judges in the court to think on the lines that he does. I was just wondering if the grandson was so persuasive and has touched so much eminent height in legal profession, how much more persuasive and how great C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar would have been.”
In his presidential address, former Governor of West Bengal Gopalkrishna Gandhi recalled how C.P. Ramaswami had given up the honorific prefix ‘Sir’ in protest against the incarceration of Mahatma Gandhi.
“But the title still stuck to him because of the affection and respect people had for him,” he said and added that C.P. Ramaswami served as an exemplary balance between the best of the Western systems of education, Governance, and the richness of Indian culture, knowledge and the Indian Renaissance.
“A Bench in Supreme Court hears 89 cases a day, as many as the highest court in U.S does in a year”
