🏛️ Polity
Supreme Court Collegium clears 11 names for Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh High Courts
In 60 seconds: The Supreme Court Collegium on Friday approved 11 names for two high courts. It recommended six people as judges of the Chhattisgarh High Court, four of them advocates and two judicial officers. It also cleared five judicial officers for the Madhya Pradesh High Court. The recommendations now go to the Union government, and the President formally appoints high court judges under Article 217 of the Constitution.
Why it matters
High courts carry huge case loads, and every vacancy slows justice. Each round of collegium picks shows how the bench is filled from both the bar and the lower judiciary.
Explain it simply
A cricket team picks some players from club cricket and promotes others from its own junior side. High courts do the same, taking judges from both lawyers and the lower courts.
The 3-minute read
What happened
At its meeting on 30 October, the collegium recommended advocates Anand Shukla, Ratna Nidhi Pusty, Shashank Thakur and Sourabh Sharma and judicial officers Rajnish Shrivastava and Balram Prasad Verma for Chhattisgarh. For Madhya Pradesh it named judicial officers Renuka Kanchan, Krishnamurty Mishra, Virendra Singh Rajput, Mamta Jain and Ashita Shrivastava.
Background
High court judges are drawn from two pools: practising advocates and judicial officers from the district judiciary. For high court appointments, the Supreme Court collegium is made up of the Chief Justice of India and the two senior-most judges.
How it works
A high court's own collegium first proposes names. These are checked by the state and Union governments, then reviewed by the Supreme Court collegium, which sends its final recommendation to the Centre.
What's next
The Union Law Ministry processes the names, and the appointments take effect once the President signs the warrants and the Centre notifies them.
What it means for you
For judiciary aspirants, this shows two routes to a high court: years at the bar, or rising through the district judiciary after a judicial services exam.
Key numbers
- 11: Names cleared for two high courts
- 4 + 2: Advocates and judicial officers for Chhattisgarh
- 5: Judicial officers for Madhya Pradesh
Both sides
- Supporters of the collegium: Judges choosing judges protects the judiciary's independence from the government of the day.
- Critics: The process is opaque, and the reasons for choosing or skipping a name are rarely made public.
Key terms explained
- Collegium
- A group of the senior-most Supreme Court judges, led by the CJI, that recommends names for appointment and transfer of judges.
- Judicial officer
- A judge of the district or subordinate judiciary, such as a district judge or civil judge, recruited through the state judicial service.
The story so far
- Oct 1993: Second Judges Case gives the judiciary the lead role in picking judges, creating the collegium. In the Second Judges Case, the Supreme Court read 'consultation' with the Chief Justice of India as giving the judiciary primacy in appointments. This gave rise to the collegium of senior judges.
- Oct 2015: Supreme Court strikes down the NJAC law, keeping the collegium system in place. Parliament had passed the 99th Constitutional Amendment to set up a National Judicial Appointments Commission. A five-judge bench held it unconstitutional, and the collegium continued.
- Today: SC collegium clears 11 names for Chhattisgarh and MP High Courts
Exam notes (UPSC, SSC, Banking, PSC)
- High court judges are appointed by the President under Article 217, after consulting the CJI, the Governor and the high court's Chief Justice.
- To be a high court judge, one needs 10 years in a judicial office or 10 years as an advocate of a high court.
- High court judges retire at 62; Supreme Court judges retire at 65.
- The NJAC (99th Amendment) was struck down in the Fourth Judges Case in 2015.
Likely exam question: Trace the evolution of the collegium system. Is it time to replace it with a more transparent mechanism?