National Lok Adalat settles 63,000 matters, SC pendency drops slightly

The National Lok Adalat on Saturday settled around 63,000 bank-related matters. The cases involved disputes under section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act and recovery suits worth over 200 crore rupees..According to a PIB release, 26,000 of these were pending matters and 37,000 were pre-litigation matters. The matters were listed before a bench of Supreme Court judges comprising Justice FMI Kalifulla and Justice RK Agrawal..The next National Lok Adalat is scheduled to be convened on September 12 and will deal with pending criminal compoundable matters..In related news, the number of pending cases at the Supreme Court has decreased from 61,300 as of March 1 to 61,016 as of July 29. This information was provided by Law Minister DV Sadananda Gowda last week. As of now, there are three vacancies in the apex court. Replying to a question put forth by an MP in the Lok Sabha, Gowda said,.“No study has been conducted by the government in the recent past about pendency of cases in the Supreme court on account of insufficient number of judges.”.Gowda further stated that there was no proposal to increase the strength of Judges of Supreme Court or to increase their retirement age..On the topic of vacancies, the latest statistics reveal that there are 381 vacancies in high courts across the country. In other words, over 37.75% of posts in the higher judiciary lie vacant. This is a significant increase from just March this year, when the number of vacancies stood at 346..The Allahabad High Court leads the way with 84 vacancies out of a sanctioned strength of 160, meaning that more than half of the posts lie vacant. The Karnataka High Court has 30 vacancies as against an approved strength of 62..On the other end of the spectrum, the Kerala High Court is functioning at its full approved strength of 38 judges. The Orissa High Court has 5 vacancies as against its approved strength of 27 judges.