Cheque-bounce cases clog courts

The Bombay High Court has echoed the Supreme Court’s lament about cheque bounce cases constituting 20 per cent dockets in criminal courts all over the country and asked the magistrate in a nine-year-old case to conduct day-today hearings and dispose it of expeditiously. The high court noted that in the Aurangabad region alone there were 72,096 cheque-bounce cases pending. The SC last month had asked the high courts to allow the use of online facilities to dispose of such cases. The high court judgment in the case, Ramgopal Automobiles vs State of Maharashtra, directed its registrar general to place the problem before the Chief Justice so that urgent action could be taken to dispose of the cases clogging criminal courts. In this case, a writ petition was moved in the high court by a firm which complained about a bounced cheque because the magistrate’s court was not concluding the proceedings even after nine years.