SC trashes 13,147 old cases in one stroke to unclog justice delivery system at top court

New Delhi: In a big step towards unclogging the top judiciary burdened with humongous pendency of cases, the Supreme Court has, in one massive sweep, binned 13,147 old “diarised but unregistered” cases, including one filed more than three decades ago.

An order issued by Registrar Judicial-1 Chirag Bhanu Singh on Thursday said all the cases were filed more than eight years ago but the defects pointed out by the registry to the respective counsel or petitioners in-person were not “cured”.

The cases got the diary numbers prior to the year 2014, and the list included a case filed way back in 1987.

The petitions just sat idly in the registry, adding to the ever growing pendency.

As per the data uploaded on the Supreme Court website, there were as many as 70,310 pending cases as on September 1, 2022. These included 51,839 miscellaneous matters and 18,471 related to regular hearing.

The order by the SC registrar said the parties to the cases seemingly do not intend to prosecute the litigations any further as they did not cure the defects even after a lapse of several years.

“These bunch of 13,147 unregistered but diarised cases were registered prior to 2014, to be precise before August 19, 2014. The cases were filed more than 8 years ago. As per the practice then in vogue, the matters had been returned to the counsel/petitioner-in-person for rectifying the defects noticed in the matters respectively. They have never been rectified ever,” the order said.

“For all the reasons discussed hereinabove, I am constrained but to hold that there is no valid and a plausible reason to allow the aforesaid matters to be received for registration. I decline to register the aforesaid diary numbers,” it noted.