High Court wants technically qualified staff to address judicial system crisis amid shortages | Mumbai News

Mumbai: After last December turning an administrative report regarding staff shortage, in a contempt petition, into a suo motu petition, Bombay high court on Friday sought action from the State and said merely appointing staff was insufficient to tackle the crisis – they need to be technically qualified to handle modern judicial requirements.
The Bench directed the State to account not only for present staffing shortages but also for future requirements.
The registry had indicated a deficit of 453 persons on the Original Side and 792 persons on Appellate Side making it a total of 1245 personnel.
A division bench of Justice Ajay Gadkari and Justice Chandak on Friday was factoring in the fact that HC would have a new futuristic complex in the future at Bandra East and would staff shortages which cannot be countenanced now would not be countenanced then.
Additional government pleader Abhay Patki informed the bench that the State would be taking all possible steps to make appointments.
Patki said that govt would surely sanction the required staff once the proposal to that effect is submitted by the High Court to the State Govt, after taking views of General Administration Department and the Finance Department. He said the conditions for all such appointments would be subject to the poroposal satisfying all norms and details of class of posts in its financial outlay etc. He also said the officials of the High Court registry should hold discussions with the officials from government to sort out the matter as soon as possible. And assured that the proposals as may be submitted would be considered as soon as possible and that the State authorities would not create any obstructions.
In Dec 2024 while hearing a contempt plea the HC registry had when asked for had stated in a report dated 14th December 2024 to indicate the additional staff requirement in each department both on Original Side and Appellate Side.
The HC had earlier observed that “invariably due to insufficient staff, the functioning of our Courts get hampered. Illustratively, many times the files are not located or traced (as for want of racks and storage facilities – they are necessarily kept on the floor, moreover there is no space on the floor too and difficult to segregate matters), the documents filed in form of affidavits/replies by parties to the Petition are not annexed timely, not bound and paginated correctly, as required for the record.”
HC noted that Orders passed are often not stitched/attached to the file before the Division Benches and theorder thereof is placed in one of the file and not in the other. Sorting and filtering of matters becomes difficult for the smooth functioning of Courts.
Consequently, it affects board preparation and even bringing matters to the court once it is prepared. Illustratively, if matters have several volumes, all of them are not brought to the Court and consequently the matters cannot be proceeded with or if proceeded with are burdened with additional copies ofthe same documents. Now the Courts claim to have gone digital, but not only are there less scanning and printing machines but also short of manpower to do the work and therefore all the cases are not uploaded on the e-filingsystem of the Court to make our Court paperless. The already overburdened staff is required to do additional work which elongates their work hours on daily basis, the HC observed.