Trial courts face SIR burden that earlier hobbled Bengal schools

KOLKATA: It is now the turn of the state’s trial courts to face the challenges that Bengal’s schools have navigated over the past three months.


Across the state on Sunday, judges in district courts held a series of meetings with district magistrates and police superintendents to work out the modalities for scrutinising documents related to 45 lakh disputed SIR cases.




Officials said 23 district judges and 150 senior judges have been released to adjudicate the SIR cases.


Election Commission (EC), however, has requested that 294 judges — one for every assembly constituency in Bengal — be released for the job.


An EC official told TOI late on Sunday evening that a list of the disputed cases was yet to be handed to Calcutta High Court. The HC administration had on Saturday cancelled the leaves of all senior district judges till March 9 because of the SIR work.


At present, Bengal’s trial courts have 38,79,176 pending cases. The majority (32,39,515) of them are criminal cases, and the rest are civil. With so many trial court judges set to get involved in the adjudication of the 45 lakh SIR cases, sources in the judicial department are worried the pendency would only increase.


Bengal’s schools faced a similar situation in the midst of the exam season. Around 60,000 of the state’s 3.3 lakh schoolteachers were appointed as booth-level officers for the SIR, resulting in a shortage of teachers during the Madhyamik-Higher Secondary exam season.


With nearly 200 judges having been assigned SIR work, the HC on Saturday night prepared a roster of 95 judges from district courts across Bengal who will handle drug-related cases, cases of sexual offences against children and other special act cases. These 95 judges won’t be involved in SIR work.


Chief Justice Sujoy Paul of the HC has formed a five-member committee to make arrangements for shifting cases of an “interim relief or urgent nature” to alternative courts. The committee will be chaired by two HC judges.


All district judges, additional district judges and judicial officers attended a virtual session on Sunday afternoon to get trained in the modalities of adjudicating the SIR cases. Chief Justice Paul, HC justices Tapabrata Chakraborty and Arijit Banerjee (who are part of the five-member committee), chief secretary Nandini Chakravorty, DGP Peeyush Pandey, Kolkata police commissioner Supratim Sarkar and special observer Subrata Gupta were among those who were present at the meeting. The training will continue on Monday.


“In the first phase, fewer than 200 judicial officers will be involved in the SIR work. Their numbers will increase in later phases. Their login IDs will be created by Monday,” an EC official said on Sunday. “Judges will log in using their phone numbers. The login IDs will be prepared constituency-wise, with names and phone numbers. There will be CCTV surveillance.”


Among the pending cases across Bengal, 204,553 are sessions court cases (serious criminal cases tried by a Court of Session, the highest criminal court in a district). South 24 Parganas has the highest number of such cases (32,097), followed by North 24 Parganas (29,732) and Murshidabad (20,890). Kolkata has 2,357 pending sessions court cases.


Pending magisterial cases (which are heard in a magistate’s court) total 2,839,602. Kolkata has the highest number of such cases (1,386,113), followed by South 24 Parganas (220,998) and North 24 Parganas (220,965).