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Cabinet approves raising strength of SC judges to 34

NEW DELHI:The Union Cabinet on Wednesday cleared a Bill to increase the sanctioned strength of the Supreme Court judges from 31 to 34, including the Chief Justice of India.

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Satya Prakash
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, July 31

The Union Cabinet on Wednesday cleared a Bill to increase the sanctioned strength of the Supreme Court judges from 31 to 34, including the Chief Justice of India.

Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar said once Parliament gave approval to the Bill, the number of sanctioned strength of judges, including the CJI, would reach 34 in the Supreme Court.

Read also: CJI allows CBI to book Allahabad High Court judge

Only recently, the Supreme Court managed to fill all posts of judges after a gap of almost a decade. But despite that as on July 1, there were 59,695 cases pending in the top court.

The Cabinet’s decision comes a month after Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, seeking to increase the strength of judges in view of increasing pendency of cases in the top court due to filing of more fresh cases.

The CJI had also written about increasing the retirement age of high court judges from 62 years to 65 years, but the government hasn’t acted upon this suggestion.

The CJI had highlighted that due to paucity of judges, the required number of Constitution Benches to decide important cases involving questions of law were not being set up.

The original Constitution of 1950 envisaged a Supreme Court with eight judges, including the CJI, leaving it to Parliament to increase the sanctioned strength of judges.

Initially, the SC judges used to sit together to hear the cases presented before them. As the cases began to accumulate, Parliament increased the number of judges from eight in 1950 to 11 in 1956, 14 in 1960, 18 in 1978 and 26 in 1986.

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