NEW DELHI: In a sharp reminder to SC Collegium and Centre about gender diversity in constitutional courts, former CJI N V Ramana on Saturday said making a noise about gender without giving proper representation to women in constitutional courts would amount to nothing but tokenism.Speaking at a symposium at SRM School of Law, Justice Ramana said in 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 CJI. Of them two have retired and third one, Justice 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 NCLT to issue a notice 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 former CJI’s plea for expeditious implementation of SC Collegium’s recommendations for appointments to constitutional courts was taken forward by senior advocate A M Singhvi, who said that for decades HCs have been functioning with two-thirds of their sanctioned strength and the trial courts at present operate with four-fifths of their capacity of around 25,000 judges.He said pendency of cases is directly linked to vacancy for judges in trial courts and HCs. Singhvi highlighted that the govt and SC have worked out an MoP as per the law laid down by SC, which mandated that the govt has to expeditiously appoint candidates recommended by SC Collegium. In case the govt returns a name with objections but the SC reiterates the candidature, then the govt has no option but to appoint that person as HC judge.
