Sakina Tashrifwala
Published on: 16 September 2022 at 17:36 IST
13,147 unregistered but diary cases that were registered before 2014 were cancelled by order of the Supreme Court Registry. The cases were filed before August 19, 2014, more than eight years ago. It was also made clear that the cases had been diarized and sent for correction, but no response had been received. It was discovered that one of the oldest diary numbers had a connection to the year 1987.
The order stated that, “As per the practise then in vogue, the matters had been returned to the Ld. counsel/petitioner-in-person for rectifying the defects noticed in the matters respectively.”
“They have never been rectified. Nothing has been heard thereafter, either from the Ld. Counsel or the party-in-person, in respect of these diary numbers.”
The order made note of the fact that all 13,147 things had only been diarized and that no other matching record was either available or kept because the registry had not kept any documents while disclosing the flaws. A provision to keep one copy of the plaint and court fee stamps with the registry wasn’t made until the Supreme Court Rules of 2013 went into effect.
According to the order, the parties had been informed of the matters’ faults years earlier and were required to remedy them within 28 days. The parties had been aware of the problems for years but had taken no action to correct or cure them.
“The statutory period for curing the defects is well over. Apparently, the parties do not intend to prosecute the list any further. Umpteen number of years were allowed to the parties to cure the defects, but to no avail,” the order stated.
The order also stated that no attempts had been made by the parties to request an extension of time to correct the deficiencies, even after the 28-day period had passed, and that the defects had continued to this day without a valid explanation.
Further it was also added that, “Matters have vanished along with time itself. Literally nothing exists right now.”
The removal of these cases from the records would have made a dent in the total number of cases held pending before the Supreme Court of India, which as of August 2022 totalled 71,411, of which 56,365 were civil matters and 15,076 were criminal proceedings.