Calcutta High Court finally settles the oldest pending case
In what can be seen as a delayed victory for the judiciary, seventy-two years after the case was filed, the Calcutta Hight Court finally settled the oldest pending case in Indian Judiciary.
What is the case?
Case number 71/1951 was filed on January 1, 1951. The case pertains to the issue of liquidation of Berhampore Bank Ltd. In November 1948 the Calcutta High Court ordered the Berhampore Bank to wind up operations in the face of insolvency and pending litigation.
A petition was then filed challenging these liquidation proceedings and registered as ‘Case No. 71/1951’. The Bank at that time had been entangled in multiple litigations to recover its money from debtors, who later moved court to challenge the claims made by the Bank.
It was also reported that the case came up for hearing in September 2022, but no one turned up for them. The assistant liquidator told the Bench that the case has been settled in August 2006, but it was not updated in the records and ended up staying in the ‘pending list’.
The case was finally settled on January 9, 2023, by Justice Ravi Krishna Kapur. He ordered that the typographical error made in his September 19, 2022, order be corrected and the case be disposed of. Ironically, the current Chief Justice Prakash Shrivastava of Calcutta High Court, was born a decade after the case had been filed in 1951.
India's oldest litigation at 72 years was disposed of last week by a bench of the country's oldest high court, whose current Chief Justice was born a full decade after the case had been filed in 1951. Two of the next five oldest pending cases (filed in 1952) are still pending pic.twitter.com/I9N4j5sCEM
— itatonline.org (@itatonlineorg) January 16, 2023
The issue of pending cases
With this case out of the way, two cases filed in 1952 are still pending in the Calcutta High Court. The two cases are being heard in Malda, West Bengal civil courts.
According to National Judicial Data Grid, there are still more than 115463 cases pending for more than 30 years in the Courts. The issue of pendency of cases is a huge problem for the Indian Judiciary and one that needs to be looked at urgently. The reason for the cases are due to bottlenecks at every level of case proceedings.
