Supreme Court to examine whether it can issue directions on administrative side to High Courts after AG KK Venugopal raises objection

The Supreme Court of India will examine whether it can issue directions to the High Court on its administrative side after Attorney General for India (AG) KK Venugopal raised vehement objection to such directions passed by the top court to Allahabad High Court [M/s Chopra Fabricators And Manufacturers Pvt Ltd vs Bharat Pumps And Compressors Ltd And Anr]..A bench of Justices MR Shah and BV Nagarathna recorded the AG's objection while also stating that such directions/ interventions by the top court should not be seen as a prestige issue by High Courts. "At this stage, Mr. KK Venugopal, learned Attorney General, has very emphatically argued that this Court has no jurisdiction to issue directions on administrative side to the High Courts. We may remind that this is not an adversarial litigation at all. The High Court ought not to have and should not have taken the same as a prestige or ego issue. Only in a case where the High Court has failed to perform its duty and/or monitoring/supervision and even it can be seen that before this Court intervened, as such, no serious efforts were made by the High Court on administrative side to see that commercial cases are disposed of at the earliest, that is why this Court was required to intervene," the Court said in its order.Be that as it may, the aforesaid larger issue will be dealt with and considered later, the Court added.The Court was dealing with a case relating to pendency of commercial disputes before the Allahabad High Court.During one of the previous hearings in April, the Court had expressed its concern over the large number of execution applications pending before the Allahabad High Court under Section 34 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act. The Court had said that pendency of such execution applications and commercial disputes was affecting the ease of doing business.It had, therefore, ordered the Allahabad High Court Chief Justice to present a road map towards early disposal of execution petitions under the Arbitration Act as well as commercial cases.Pursuant to that, the High Court had filed an affidavit which said 40,000 execution petitions are pending in Uttar Pradesh, and the situations was such that these are being distributed among judicial officers and additional judges.It further said that between May 1, 2022 and July 4, 2022, 9,678 execution petitions and 1,373 petitions under Section 34 of the Arbitration Act were disposed of. The Court proceeded to seek one more status report from the High Court regarding the progress in disposal of the matters relating to the commercial disputes.At this stage, the AG raised objections to such directions which the bench said will be considered later.The matter will be heard again on August 16..[Read order]