23 new judges in three months yet vacancy in High Court touches 31

A recent report in the Times of India indicates that 31 percent of the sanctioned posts in various high courts across the country are lying vacant. The Ministry of Law has stated that the primary obstacle for eliminating vacancies is a lack of “sufficient proposals” from the chief justices of the various high courts..This is despite the fact that the last few months of 2011 have seen a clearly discernible rise in the ranks of the higher judiciary across the country. From September 13 onwards, there have been twenty three new judges appointed to various high courts and five judges to the Supreme Court..On October 17, 2011, three new judges were appointed to the Delhi High Court and the month of November saw eight additions to the Bench of the Allahabad High Court..On December 21, 2011 alone, the President appointed ten new Judges to the High Court of Madras and Bombay, a move that is certainly one of the largest filing up of vacancies in the higher judiciary in recent times..The President also appointed Justice Adarsh Goel, a judge in the Gauhati High Court, as Chief Justice of the Gauhati High Court. The said post had been lying vacant since the transfer of Justice Madan Lokur as Chief Justice of the Andhra Pradesh High Court. Justice Lokur, who had been appointed as Acting Chief Justice of the Karnataka High Court during the controversy surrounding Justice Dinakaran, was made Chief Justice of the Andhra High Court on November 15,2011..Justice Vikramajit Sen, also from the Delhi High Courts, had earlier been transferred to the Karnataka High Court and has now been made the Chief Justice of the same court. Justice Sen was part of the three Judge Bench of the Delhi High Court which had upheld the ruling that the office of the Chief Justice of India fell under the ambit of the Right to Information Act..On December 27, 2011, the President also appointed additional judge, Justice Nawal Kishore Agarwal as a permanent judge of the Chattisgarh High Court and appointed Justice T Raja to be a Judge of the Madras High Court..As per statistics available with Bar & Bench, at the end of the year 2010, there were a total of 291 posts lying vacant in High Courts across the country, a figure which is eerily similar to the 285 vacant posts at the end of 2011 quoted in the Times of India report.