NEW DELHI: In a sharp reminder to the SC Collegium and the Centre about gender diversity in constitutional courts, former CJI N V Ramana Saturday said making a noise about gender without giving proper representation to women in the constitutional courts would amount to nothing but tokenism.At a symposium at SRM School of Law, Justice Ramana said in the last 75 years, SC has had only 11 women judges, of whom three had taken oath four years ago on Aug 31, 2021, when he was the CJI. Of them twos have retired and the third one, Justice B V Nagarathna, will become first woman CJI in Sept 2027 for a very short period of 36 days. “Our institutions must reflect our social fabric. Gender diversity and inclusivity is not tokenism. It is a necessity to enrich our perspectives with social realities. This issue needs a larger consideration. Inclusivity does not happen naturally… Bringing in inclusivity calls for concerted efforts at the highest level,” he said.Justice Ramana highlighted how infrastructure issues had forced National Company Law Tribunal to issue a public notice on Sept 3 regarding the shutting down of three of its six courtrooms and said that during his tenure as CJI he had tried to persuade the govt and other stakeholders to create a National Judicial Infrastructure Authority to assess and supervise creation of adequate infrastructure for the three-tier justice delivery mechanism. The efforts did not fructify.The ex-CJI’s plea for expeditious implementation of SC Collegium’s recommendations for appointments to constitutional courts was taken forward by advocate A M Singhvi, who said for decades the HCs have been functioning with two-thirds of their sanctioned strength and the trial courts operate with four-fifths of their capacity of 25,000 judges.He said pendency of cases is directly linked to vacancy for judges in trial courts and HCs. Singhvi highlighted that govt and SC have worked out an MoP as per the law laid down by SC, which mandated govt has to expeditiously appoint candidates recommended by the SC Collegium.
