The Supreme Court’s new roster, notified under the direction of Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant on Monday, expands the range of subject categories assigned to benches, distributing a wider cross-section of commercial disputes, taxation, education, family law, environmental issues, and other civil and criminal matters among judges.
One of the more notable changes is in the allocation to Justice MM Sundresh, whose roster now includes company law, competition law, direct taxation, educational institutions, environmental law, insolvency and bankruptcy, land acquisition and land laws, among other subjects. These categories were not part of his July allocation, which covered areas such as civil and criminal law, family disputes, election matters, judiciary-related cases, labour and industrial law, and service matters. Justice Vikram Nath’s allocation has also expanded considerably. Besides civil and criminal matters, educational institutions, election disputes, environmental law, family law and service matters, his new roster includes arbitration, aviation, banking, company law, compensation, competition law and consumer disputes. The changes bring a wider range of commercial and regulatory litigation within his assigned categories. The revised roster expands the spread of subjects before other benches. Justice Dipankar Datta, for instance, has been assigned family law, habeas corpus and preventive detention, land acquisition, land laws and lotteries, betting and gambling, in addition to a broad range of civil, criminal, commercial, taxation and service matters. Justice PS Narasimha’s allocation now expressly includes matters relating to bar councils, bar associations and advocates, family law, housing and municipal issues, and judiciary-related cases, alongside arbitration, company law, taxation, education, environmental law, insolvency and intellectual property disputes. The allocation of subjects continues to overlap across benches, allowing multiple benches to deal with broad categories such as civil law, criminal law, taxation and service matters. The October notification retains the Chief Justice’s wider administrative framework for managing the court’s docket. Three-judge benches headed by the CJI, Justice Vikram Nath and Justice BV Nagarathna will mainly deal with three-judge matters on non-miscellaneous days — Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Separately, the roster continues the targeted allocation of older cases for regular hearings. Justice Dipankar Datta’s bench will deal with the oldest regular-hearing service matters on non-miscellaneous days, while benches headed by justices Prashant Kumar Mishra and SVN Bhatti will exclusively hear the oldest civil matters. The oldest criminal cases will similarly be taken up by benches headed by Justices Manoj Misra and Ujjal Bhuyan.
The roster is therefore an administrative distribution of fresh cases rather than an exclusive specialisation system in which each subject is confined to one judge.
