NEW DELHI: Unhappy with a Jodhpur labour court award, a health worker from Jalore district, Rajasthan, engaged on a daily wage basis and whose services were terminated in 1999 had moved Rajasthan HC in 2004.The petition is yet to be heard, 22 years later.With pendency in HCs crossing the 65 lakh mark, there is a steady stream of petitions before the Supreme Court pleading for directions to the HCs concerned, not for expeditious adjudication of their grievance but for early hearing on their petitions after prolonged wait for justice. Nearly 15 lakh such cases have remained pending in HCs for over a a decade.Most applications come from Allahabad HC and Rajasthan HC, where the pendency of cases is 12.5 lakh and 7 lakh respectively.In Allahabad HC, each judge/bench takes up an average of 150-200 cases every day for hearing, but the monstrous pendency appears to be overwhelming the judicial decision-making capacity. The erstwhile health worker from Jalore made a similar plea before a bench headed by CJI Surya Kant Wednesday.Given the constitutionally independent status of HCs and realising the daily case list before each judge in HCs, the CJI-led bench passed the standard order, “We see no ground to entertain the petition but give liberty to the petitioner to move an application seeking early hearing of the petition.”The SC is aware that it is not superior to HCs on the administrative side and the chief justices concerned of HCs, as per the SC’s own ruling, are the masters of roster, prohibiting it from directing them to list certain cases for early hearing.
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Moreover, if the SC requests an HC to hear one case out of turn considering the number of years for which it had remained pending, then the scale of equality would mandate early hearing of all similarly old petitions.After Allahabad and Rajasthan HCs, Bombay HC has the largest pendency of 6.4 lakh cases, followed by Madras HC with 5.6 lakh cases, Madhya Pradesh HC with 4.9 lakh, Karnataka HC with 3.3 lakh, and Andhra Pradesh HC with 2.5 lakh. Compared to Bombay and Madras HCs, the HCs of Delhi and Calcutta have relatively low pendency of cases at 1.2 lakh and 1.9 lakh cases.
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