Former Supreme Court judge Abhay S.
Oka on Tuesday (October 27, 2026) said the roster system followed by the Supreme Court needs to be overhauled to bring greater transparency to the allocation of cases and eliminate the scope for “manual intervention” in their listing.
Mr. Oka pointed out that several Benches of the Supreme Court are assigned the same categories of cases under the roster, making it difficult for a litigant to know which Bench a freshly instituted case would eventually be listed before. Mr. “The Supreme Court is too much of a Chief Justice-centric court.
The Supreme Court will become more favourable to litigants if it introduces a proper roster on a par with the High Courts, so that manual intervention by the CJI is ruled out,” he said.
The practice, he said, left room for human intervention in deciding where a case would be listed. The Chief Justice of India, as the “master of the roster”, has the administrative authority to constitute Benches and allocate judicial work among them. Oka, however, said that the present system made the Supreme Court overly dependent on the office of the Chief Justice in matters of listing and allocation.
