JK HC chief justice seeks establishment of administrative tribunals

Jammu and Kashmir HC Chief Justice Gita Mittal wrote to Union Minister Jitendra Singh, demanding the establishment of administrative tribunals with multiple benches having permanent seats in Srinagar and Jammu.

Jammu: Jammu and Kashmir High Court Chief Justice Gita Mittal wrote on Tuesday to Union Minister Jitendra Singh, seeking the establishment of administrative tribunals with multiple benches having permanent seats in Srinagar and Jammu.

Expressing concerns over the lack of the required number of benches with permanent seats in Jammu and Kashmir, the chief justice apprised the minister that with the enforcement of the J&K Re-organization Act, 2019 and the issuance of the notification dated 29th of April, 2020 bearing no 208, some 31,641 pending service matters have to be transferred from both the wings of the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir to the administrative tribunals.

In the absence of any infrastructure or registry for operationalising the functioning of the tribunal in J&K, only a single circuit bench of the Chandigarh bench of the tribunal would be hopelessly insufficient to provide efficacious dispensation to the disputants in service matters in the UT of J&K as well as in Ladakh, Mittal wrote.

In the letter, the chief justice said the pendency of service matters before the Jammu or the Srinagar wing of the J-K high court was more than the pendency before the principal bench in Delhi and way more than that before the administrative tribunals in Allahabad, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Jabalpur among others.

Even for the states having extremely low pendency, separate tribunals have been created, she added.

The number of government employees in the UT of J&K is more than some of the larger states and hence, in absence of an administrative tribunal with multiple benches having permanent seats both in Jammu as well as Srinagar, the fundamental right of access to justice as also the legitimate expectation of efficacious and expeditious remedies for dispute would be adversely impacted, Mittal said.

(PTI report)