1,070 new courts for women and children from October 2: Ravi Shankar Prasad

September 14, 2019 01:33 am | Updated 01:33 am IST - Sonam Saigal

Union Minister for Law and Justice Ravi Shankar Prasad  at Mumbai University Hall on Friday.

Union Minister for Law and Justice Ravi Shankar Prasad at Mumbai University Hall on Friday.

The Union Law and Justice Minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad on Friday announced that on Gandhi Jayanti, 1,070 special courts will be set up all over the country to try sexual offences against women and children. Mr. Prasad was speaking on, “Law reforms by Modi government for New India” at the Convocation Hall, Mumbai University. He opened his speech by saying, “our government’s fundamental philosophy is reform and perform in order to transform and this is done in a democratic manner through legal processes.”

He said, the first thing the government did after coming to power was to weed out 1,486 old archaic laws and brought out far reaching amendments in the Consumer Protection Act and the Medical Council Act.

Apart from setting up special courts on October 2 this year, he said a tax reform will be brought where “no tax officer shall send any notice directly. It has to be sent to a designated booth which will consider all the records and based on random sampling and application of mind the notice shall be sent out.”

He added, “to deal with prosecution for delay in paying taxes, the government has come with a helping hand” and said, “for delay of upto ₹ 25 lakh, there will be no prosecution and it will go to a collegium of two chief commissioners who will examine the matter and on the basis of what they say, action will be taken.”

A designated senior advocate of the Supreme Court, Mr. Prasad said, “when we came to power, total income tax payers in 2013-2014, it was 3.82 crores and in 2017-2018, it was 6.86 crores.” He added, as far as tax collection is concerned, “it was ₹6.38 lakh crores in 2013-2014 and ₹10.02 lakh crores in 2017-2018.”

On appointment of judges, he said, “we appointed, 126 high court judges in 2016, in 2017 – 115 in the year 2018 – 108 and till now in 2019, 38 judges. Since 1989, he said the average appointment of judges was 72 to 82 per year, and our record is 110 and above.”

Addressing the law students present at the gathering, Mr. Prasad said, “I am very keen to establish All Indian Judicial Services. We have the finest minds from National Law Universities and they must get selected, like the Indian Administrative Services, Indian Police Services, Indian Foreign Services, we must also have Indian Judicial Services.”

An MP from Patna, Mr. Prasad spoke about triple talaq and called it “inhuman, barbaric and unconstitutional”. He also touched upon the abrogation of Article 370 and said now 153 laws are applicable to Jammu & Kashmir.

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