Lawyers bat for location of High Court in Vizag

The lawyers of Visakhapatnam have sought the location of the High Court of residual State of Andhra Pradesh in the city.

Stating that the city is home to several law colleges and Damodar Sanjeevaiah Law University, Visakhapatnam Bar Association president N.V. Badrinath urged Chief Justice of AP High Court Justice Kalyan Jyoti Sengupta to use his good office for setting up the HC in the city.

Mr. Badrinath said the city had over 4,500 advocates and the bar had a rich history. The bar produced several judges, writers, parliamentarians and activists. Both late N.T. Rama Rao and Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, when they were Chief Ministers, had promised establishing the High Court bench in the city.

“The bifurcation of the State of AP has brought to the fore the very important issue – location of capital and with it the location of the HC of the new State. Visakhapatnam is ideally suited to be the capital of the Seemandhra. However, it is to be kept in mind that a new philosophy of decentralised location of institutions has already firmly gained ground in place of the old belief that the capital city should exhaustively house all the institutions of the State. It is in the backdrop of these developments, we come before your Lordship,” he said in a memorandum.

Irrespective of the fact whether Visakhapatnam would be eventually chosen as the capital city, the lawyers would still bat for the location of the HC in the city, he said.

He also referred to the agitation for HC bench and the lawyers’ abstaining from courts in four districts in 1993 for six months and said Vizag had easy access to Vijayawada and other places.