The SC does not need more judges

Source: Hindustan Times dated 29.08.2019

By Gautam Bhatia
Limit the court’s exploding jurisdiction, and ensure clarity and consistency in its judgments

In the first week of August, the Lok Sabha passed a bill to increase the strength of Supreme Court (SC) judges from the present 30 to 33. The bill followed from a letter written by the Chief Justice of India (CJI) , where this suggestion had been first mooted as a way of decreasing the massive backlog of cases at the SC.

It is true that India has one of the worst judges-to-population ratio in the world. However, while intuitively, increasing the number of judges might seem to ease problems of pendency and backlog, the reality is more complicated — especially at the SC. The first thing to note is that a major reason for pendency at the SC is not a shortage of judges, but the court’s own ever-expanding jurisdiction. As the highest court in the land, the SC is expected to hear cases selectively. The original intention of the constitutional framers was that it would decide constitutional cases, disputes between states and the Centre, or substantial questions of law (especially where there was a disagreement between different high courts).

And this was indeed how the SC functioned in its early days. In case there was a substantial question of law involved, the high court that first heard the case would, of its own accord, grant to the parties a “certificate of leave to appeal” to the SC; without that certificate, a party would be forced to file a “special leave to appeal”, which, in an overwhelming number of cases, would be rejected. This is still the procedure followed in many other courts — including the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom — in order to ensure that the workload of the highest court is manageable.