SCBA President Writes to CJI Seeking Early Decision for Pending Issues of Bar

(Judicial Quest News Network)

The Supreme Court Bar Association’s President and Senior Advocate Vikas Singh has written a letter to Chief Justice of India NV Ramana expressing anguish at the non-consideration of pending of the Bar for long.

The letter is addressed to CJI and 5 seniors most judges of the Supreme Court has requested that an urgent action be taken at the earliest.

He said in the letter that we are now getting a feeling that SCBA, since it has never resorted to strike in its history, is not being given its due importance.

It is further submitted in the letter that SCBA had constituted a search committee which had identified 48 names for consideration for elevation in various high courts.

Severl months back the names were handed over to CJI however, none of the names suggested by the committee have been considered by any of the High Court collegium despite having a large number of the vacancies in HCs.

For the said purpose, the SCBA constituted a very credible search committee to identify names for elevation. The search committee met several times and identified 48 names.

Chamber Allotment Issue

 He has further mentioned in his letter that a decision had been taken by the earlier Executive Committee along with the Judges Committee to change the partition walls of the chambers so as to make 3 chambers out of 2 for the purpose of single allotment. However, in spite of the Association’s repeated request. The final chamber allotment list was not prepared in a time bound manner.

“We have been corresponding with the registry to find out the progress of work in terms of the decision of last executive Committee and we were told that no work has started to re-design the same.

We were also trying to get the allotment list to find out if we could request members to choose their partners from the list and made the allotment to the chamber as it exists today without any alteration but that effort also could not fructify due to delay in finalising the list. A building which is ready in every aspect is lying vacant.

The letter has also stated that the association has been asking for extra space to provide for a more proximate library, a lunch room and rooms for the president and Secretary of SCBA in the annexed building in front of the court No.11 which was verbally assured to us by the then CJI Dipak Mishra however, till date no action has been taken in this regard.

The letter further said that the present lunch room is dingy small room where any senior Advocate and Advocates practising in this court have lunch and it is said that the Pragati Vihar area which resulted in moving out large number of offices from the present present building but no commensurate place was allotted to SCBA.

Mr. Singh has also stated that since the beginning of his present tenure, he has been requesting for making available the Auditorium and meeting rooms for the functions/meetings of SCBA but the same has been denied without any justification.

Additional land was also made available due to the persistence of the SCBA which filed a petition in that behalf for the removal of Appu Ghar and giving the additional land to the Supreme Court, neither was SCBA given any additional space in the existing building and to add insult to injury SCBA was debarred from using the Auditorium.

Several letters have been written in this regard but only verbal assurance was given and till date no decision has been taken on debarment from using the Auditorium.

There are several technical issues in the virtual hearing system which is not at all acceptable to the Bar especially the feature of Advocates not having the right to Mute/Unmute themselves.

The software has been upgraded several times and with technology advancement, it is clearly not possible that feature to enable lawyers to mute unmute themselves cannot be incorporated in the virtual hearing of the Supreme Court when the same is available in the virtual hearing of all the High Courts across the country.

He further pointed out that non-listing of the matters in spite of mentioning and for some unknown reasons, a lot of categories of matters are not being listed for preliminary hearing.

SCBA demands that all matters filed should be listed strictly on the basis of date of filing and the bar should always have the right to make an urgent mentioning for listing of matters.

Mr. Singh also said that the applications from the Senior Advocates for Senior Designation not called, no steps have been taken in the last 2.5 years to call for applications from Senior designation even though the committee for designation of Senior Advocate is obliged to meet at least twice in a calendar year.

Construction of the Additional lawyers’ chambers in 1.33 Acres of land allotted to the Supreme Court of Indian behind petrol pump near ITO. However, till date no decision has been taken ion this regard and the said land is lying vacant.