The Central government has notified the appointment of twenty-one members to various Benches of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), eleven being judicial members and ten being technical members.
As per a notification issued on Sunday, October 10, the following former judges and lawyers have been appointed as judicial members:
Justice (retd.) Telaprolu Rajani (NCLT Amaravati)
Justice (retd.) Pradeep Narhari Deshmukh (NCLT Mumbai)
Justice (retd.) S Ramathilagam (NCLT Chennai)
Dharminder Singh (NCLT Delhi)
Harnam Singh Thakur (NCLT Chandigarh
P Mohan Raj (NCLT Cuttack)
Rohit Kapoor (NCLT Kolkata)
Deep Chandra Joshi (NCLT Jaipur)
Venkata Ramakrishna Badrinath Nandula (NCLT Hyderabad)
Bachu Venkat Balarama Das (NCLT Delhi)
Kishore Vemilapalli (NCLT Mumbai)
Further, the following have been appointed as technical members of various NCLTs:
Ajax Das Mehrotra (NCLT Ahmedabad)
Balraj Joshi (NCLT Kolkata)
Rahul Prasad Bhatnagar (NCLT Delhi)
Subrata Kumar Dash (NCLT Chandigarh)
Avinash K Srivastava (NCLT Delhi)
Shree Prakash Singh (NCLT Indore)
Sameer Kakar (NCLT Chennai)
Manoj Kumar Dubey (NCLT Bengaluru)
Kaushalendra Kumar Singh (NCLT Ahmedabad)
Anuradha Sanjay Bhatia (NCLT Mumbai)
Last August, the Supreme Court had pulled up the Central government over delays in filling up vacancies in various tribunals across the country. A case is also pending before the Madras High Court seeking directions to make the third Bench of the NCLT, Chennai functional.
The High Court had adjourned the case last month after it took note that the Supreme Court is seized of similar issues.
At that time, the High Court had also expressed hope that the Central government "would make every endeavour to ensure that all the posts at the Chennai NCLT are filled up at the earliest."