Frivolous cases making SC dysfunctional: Justice Chandrachud

The bench made the remark while hearing a consumer dispute case, which was wrapped up by the court in March but a fresh application was filed in the same matter

The Supreme Court on Tuesday regretted that scores of “frivolous” matters have been making it “dysfunctional”. The bench of justices Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud and MR Shah made the remark while hearing a consumer dispute case, which was wrapped up by the court in March but a fresh application was filed in the same matter.

The Supreme Court. (File photo)

As soon as the case came up for hearing, justice Chandrachud observed that the final order had already been issued in terms of what the petitioner wanted, but he chose to come back with a trivial issue. “You are here now only because you want to vet some documents before you deposit the rest of the money for the house you have been allotted. What is this? This is how the Supreme Court is being made dysfunctional,” he said.

Justice Chandrachud added that the judges in the top court have not been able to spend enough time on serious matters because of the deluge of unimportant matters.“Yesterday, I had to finalise an order in the suo motu (on its own motion) matter on Covid-19 that I could not do because I had to read up the files for today’s hearings. And 90% of the cases were frivolous,” he rued.

As on May 1, the top court had as many as 67,898 pending cases, out of which more than 49,000 cases are fresh ones that were still to be considered for admission. Less than 1% of the total pending cases comprised those for constitution bench.