New Delhi: With a view to ensuring transparency in the process of appointments, the Supreme Court collegium of judges, headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, held an informal personal interview of candidates shortlisted by the Calcutta and Madhya Pradesh high courts on March 26.
The resolution on the recommendations have been uploaded on the Supreme Court website. The collegium, which also includes Justices J. Chelameswar and Ranjan Gogoi, asked a host of questions, including about their knowledge in various branches of the law for the purpose of assessing merit and suitability for elevation to the two high courts.
Highly-placed sources said the procedure of interaction with candidates would dispel the criticism that appointments are made by the collegium secretly without any accountability.
According to the resolution, the collegium carefully scrutinised the material placed in the file which includes the views of the chief ministers as forwarded by the two states’ governors, Intelligence Bureau reports, the age, income, reported/unreported judgments in respect of all recommendees as well as the observations made by the department of justice in the file.
It says: “Apart from this, we invited all recommendees to have an interaction with them. On the basis of the interaction and having regard to all relevant factors, the collegium is of the considered view that Biswajit Basu, Amrita Sinha, Sutanu Kumar Patra, Abhijit Gangopadhyay and Jay Sengupta... are suitable for being appointed as judges of the Calcutta high court.”
With regard to the recommendation of Tirthankar Ghosh, the collegium sought further information from the acting chief justice of the high court, and in case of Hiranmay Bhattacharya the recommendation was deferred.
For the Madhya Pradesh high court, the collegium has recommended the elevation of advocate Sanjay Dwivedi and four judicial officers, Akhil Kumar Shrivastava, Brij Kishore Shrivastava, Rajendra Kumar Shrivastava and Mohammed Fahim Anwar, saying they are suitable to be appointed as judges.
