Can SC Issue Directions On Administrative Side To High Courts ? Supreme Court Agrees To Consider 'Larger Issue' Raised By Attorney General

Can Supreme Court issue directions on administrative side to the High Courts ?

The Supreme Court said it will examine this 'larger issue' raised by the Attorney General KK Venugopal.

Earlier, the Apex Court had issued certain directions to 'tackle the problem with respect to delay in deciding the matters related to commercial disputes in the State of Uttar Pradesh. During last hearing, the court had expressed displeasure at the delay in compliance of its 28th April order directing constitution of Special Arrears Committee.

In response to that, the Allahabad High Court filed an affidavit and reported that approximately 40,000 Execution Petitions are pending in the State of U.P., that now the execution petitions are distributed among the Judicial Officers and a judicial officer would have an average of 47 such cases before himself or herself, apart from judicial work, that between 01.05.2022 and 04.07.2022, 9678 Execution Petitions and 1373 Petitions under Section 34 of the Arbitration Act have been disposed of, and that the cases are transferred to the Additional District Judges in terms of Civil Laws (U.P. Amendment Act) 2019 and the distribution of the work has taken place in the month of May, 2022 itself. 

The bench comprising Justices MR Shah and BV Nagarathna directed the High Court to submit a further status report and the progress in disposal of the matters relating to the commercial disputes.

At this juncture, the Attorney General raised the jurisdiction issue. The court observed thus:

"At this stage, Mr. K.K. Venugopal, learned Attorney General, has very emphatically argued that this Court has no jurisdiction to issue directions on administrative side to the High Courts. We may remind that this is not an adversarial litigation at all. The High Court ought not to have and should not have taken the same as a prestige or ego issue. Only in a case where the High Court has failed to perform its duty and/or monitoring/supervision and even it can be seen that before this Court intervened, as such, no serious efforts were made by the High Court on administrative side to see that commercial cases are disposed of at the earliest, that is why this Court was required to intervene."

The bench said that larger issue raised by AG will be dealt with. The case stands posted to 16th August 2022.

Case Title: M/s Chopra Fabricators And Manufacturers Pvt. Ltd. v. Bharat Pumps And Compressors Ltd. And Anr. SLP (C) 4654 of 2022

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