Bombay High Court directs Maharashtra govt to swiftly act on the staff shortage in the court

Bombay High Court directs Maharashtra government to address staff shortage crisis disrupting judicial work promptly.

The Bombay High Court on Friday directed the Maharashtra government to take prompt action in deciding on the proposals submitted by the High Court registry regarding staff requirements. The High Court is hearing a suo moto (on its own) cognizance taken in December 2024 after observing that the staff shortage at the High Court premised has been severely disrupting with the judicial work of the court.  

A Division Bench of Justices A.S. Gadkari and Kamal Khata on February 21, 2025, issued the directive stressing the urgency of the matter by stating issues such as, how due to staff shortage, judges do not receive scanned petition copies for listed cases on time, Justice Gadkari pointed out.  

Giving a sense of the crisis, the judge also said that in case there are 50 matters, only 10 properly scanned matters come before the judges and rest do not even make it to the Bench because the technical staff claims the scanner is not efficiently functional. The Bench also highlighted that by just appointing staff is not going to solve the crisis as the recruited staff must be technically qualified to be able to handle the modern way of judicial requirements and that this gap must be filled considering the future requirements when the new High Court building is constructed. “The litigation is evolving, especially commercial litigation,” the Bench observed. 

In a detailed report submitted by the Prothonotary and Senior Master of the Bombay High Court on December 14, 2024, indicated that a deficit of 1,254 staff remains.  

Advocates P.M. Palshikar and Aditya Udeshi, representing the High Court Registry, informed the Bench that a proposal has been sent to the State government in December 2024 with the details of staff requirement at the High Court.  

In December, the Bench in a detailed order stated, “It is observed by us that, invariably due to insufficient staff, the functioning of our Courts gets hampered. Illustratively, many times the files are not located or traced (as for want of racks and storage facilities—they are necessarily kept on the floor, moreover, there is no space on the floor too, and it is difficult to segregate matters). The documents filed in form of affidavits/replies by parties to the petition are not annexed timely, not bound and paginated correctly, as required for the record. The Orders passed are often not stitched/attached to the file before the Division Benches and the order thereof is placed in one of the files and not in the other.”  

The court also observed that due to this crisis, sorting and filtering of matters becomes difficult for the smooth functioning of courts. Consequently, it affects board preparation and even bringing matters to the Court once it is prepared. “Illustratively, if matters have several volumes, all of them are not brought to the Court and consequently the matters cannot be proceeded with or if proceeded with are burdened with additional copies of the same documents,” the order copy said.