highlights
The Calcutta High Court disposed of one of the oldest cases in the country after 72 years.
The current Chief Justice of the High Court, Prakash Srivastava, was born a decade after the case was registered.
The Calcutta High Court still has to dispose of two of the five oldest pending cases in the country.
Kolkata. Finally, the Calcutta High Court has completed the task of disposing of one of the oldest cases in the country after 72 years. It is very interesting that Prakash Srivastava, the present Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court, was born in 1951, a full decade after the case was registered. For the time being, the Calcutta High Court would be relieved that the litigation related to the winding up proceedings of the erstwhile Berhampore Bank Ltd has finally come to an end. Yet the Calcutta High Court is yet to dispose of two of the five oldest pending cases in the country. All these cases were filed in 1952.
According to a Times of India news, out of the remaining three oldest cases in the country, two civil cases are going on in the civil courts of Malda in Bengal and one is pending in the Madras High Court. The courts in Malda have held hearings in March and November to try to settle these long-standing cases. The Berhampur case is mentioned in the National Judicial Data Grid as the oldest case heard in any Indian court as of 9 January. When Justice Ravi Krishna Kapoor signed the settlement order on September 19 last year, it was sealed and delivered with typographical corrections.
Significantly, this whole matter arose from the order of the Calcutta High Court on November 19, 1948, to close the bankrupt and litigation-ridden Berhampur Bank. A petition challenging the order of closure of the bank was filed on January 1, 1951 and was registered as ‘Case No. 71/1951’ on the same day. Berhampur Bank was embroiled in several lawsuits to recover money from debtors. Many of these borrowers had moved the court challenging the claims of the bank.
More than 4 crore cases pending in lower courts across the country, 1 lakh cases are more than 30 years old
According to records, the petition challenging the closure order of Berhampur Bank came up for hearing twice in the High Court in September last year, but none came up. After this, Justice Kapoor sought a report from the liquidator of the court. On September 19, the assistant liquidator told the bench that the matter had been settled in August 2006. It was found that it was not updated in the records, due to which the matter remained in the pending list.
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Tags: calcutta high court, High Courts, madras high court, west bengal news
FIRST PUBLISHED : January 16, 2023, 08:00 IST
