Jammu and Kashmir High Court Chief Justice Gita Mittal haswritten to Union Minister Jitendra Singh, seeking establishment ofadministrative tribunals with multiple benches having permanent seats inSrinagar and Jammu.
Mittal wrote to the minister on Tuesday, a statement issuedhere said.
Expressing concerns over the lack of the required number ofbenches with permanent seats in Jammu and Kashmir, the chief justice apprisedthe minister that with the enforcement of the J&K Re-organization Act, 2019and the issuance of the notification dated 29th of April, 2020 bearing no 208,some 31,641 pending service matters have to be transferred from both the wingsof the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir to the administrative tribunals.
In the absence of any infrastructure or registry foroperationalising the functioning of the tribunal in J&K, only a singlecircuit bench of the Chandigarh bench of the tribunal would be hopelesslyinsufficient to provide efficacious dispensation to the disputants in servicematters in the UT of J&K as well as in Ladakh, Mittal wrote.
In the letter, the chief justice said the pendency ofservice matters before the Jammu or the Srinagar wing of the J-K high court wasmore than the pendency before the principal bench in Delhi and way more thanthat before the administrative tribunals in Allahabad, Chennai, Hyderabad,Kolkata and Jabalpur among others.
Even for the states having extremely low pendency, separatetribunals have been created, she added.
The number of government employees in the UT of J&K ismore than some of the larger states and hence, in absence of an administrativetribunal with multiple benches having permanent seats both in Jammu as well asSrinagar, the fundamental right of access to justice as also the legitimateexpectation of efficacious and expeditious remedies for dispute would be adverselyimpacted, Mittal said.