It’s raining PILs in Supreme Court, deluge in CJI’s court | India News – Times of India

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court is experiencing an unusually heavy workload of PILs since Justice U U Lalit took over as the 49th CJI, as true to his words, he has pulled out PILs gathering dust from dingy storerooms of the Registry to list them along with freshly filed PILs.
Monday, as many as 228 PILs are listed for hearing before 15 benches. The downpour of PILs is causing a deluge in the CJI’s courtroom, the biggest in the SC. Of the 228 PILs, the PIL count in CJI’s court is 205, of which 189 challenge the validity of contentious Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and are bunched together under one item.

On an average, each bench every day hears 60 items, some of which include many petitions bunched under one item, within a scheduled 270 minutes of business time. This means, on an average, each item would get less than five minutes of judicial attention.
The CJI-led bench traditionally has had the lion’s share of PILs filed in the apex court. But, the lion’s share appears to have grown even bigger in the last fortnight. On September 5, a total of 76 PILs were listed before the benches, of which 32 were before the CJI-led bench.
Last week, from September 5-9, a total of 152 PILs were listed in SC, of which 51 were before a bench headed by CJI Lalit. The rush of the PILs, along with the daily caseload, appears to have left the judges burning midnight oil and somewhat exasperated.
A two-judge bench on Friday refused to grant adjournment of hearing saying they have read the case file by working till late in the night and the counsel must not expect them to devote time again for reading it afresh on some other day. But it was forced to adjourn the hearing in another case. It said, “The case files reached us at the eleventh hour and we had no time to read them.”
Another two-judge bench on Friday brushed aside repeated requests from counsel D N Ray to fix the next date of hearing for the case, which was getting adjourned. The lead judge said, “I cannot give a fixed date. I am not able to honour the dates, which I had earlier fixed for cases. The mode of listing has changed.” This indicates that given the rush to list loads of cases as early as possible, the judges are leaving it to the registry the responsibility of giving dates for next hearing in adjourned cases.