Image Source: THE TRIBUNE

The Chief Justice of High Court of Jammu and Kashmir, Gita Mittal, has written to Dr Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of State, seeking the establishment of the Administrative Tribunal with multiple benches having permanent seats in Jammu and Srinagar. While showing her deep concern regarding the lack of required number of Benches with permanent seats in Jammu and Kashmir, the Chief Justice has apprised the Minister that with the enforcement of the J&K Re-organisation Act, 2019, notified vide SO 2889 (E) dated August 9, 2019, and the issuance of notification dated April 29, 2020, bearing No. 208, some 31,641 pending service matters have to be transferred from both wings of the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir to the Administrative Tribunals and in the absence of any infrastructure or registry for operationalising the functioning of the Tribunal in J&K and 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. In the letter, the Chief Justice has brought to the knowledge of the minister the fact that the pendency of the service matters before either the Jammu or the Srinagar wing of the High Court is more than the pendency before the Principal Bench at Delhi and way more than that before the Administrative Tribunals at Allahabad, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Jabalpur and amongst others even for the states having extremely low pendency, separate Tribunals have been created. Even the area of Union Territories of J&K and Ladakh is more than that of other UTs of the country and is equivalent, if not greater than, other states. The number of government employees in the UT of J&K is also more than some of the larger states and, hence, in the 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 disputes would be adversely impacted.