Centre Notifies Appointment of 29 High Court Judges, Including Two for Himachal Pradesh High Court

The Centre on Friday notified the appointment of 29 judges across various High Courts, including two for the Himachal Pradesh High Court.

The Himachal Pradesh High Court, which currently has only 11 judges against a sanctioned strength of 17, will now see the appointment of advocates Jia Lal Bhardwaj and Romesh Verma as judges. Their appointments were earlier announced by Union Law Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal on September 10.

In other changes, Justice Soumen Sen of the Calcutta High Court has been appointed Chief Justice of the Meghalaya High Court. Justice Sanjiv Prakash Sharma of the Rajasthan High Court will take over as Chief Justice of that court following the retirement of Justice Kalpana Rajendra Shriram on September 27. Justice Sujoy Paul of the Calcutta High Court has been appointed its new Chief Justice, succeeding Justice Soumen Sen.

The Centre has also approved the appointment of 24 judges to the Allahabad High Court — 10 advocates and 14 judicial officers.

The advocates appointed are Vivek Saran, Vivek Kumar Singh, Garima Prasad, Sudhanshu Chauhan, Abdhesh Kumar Chaudhary, Swaroopma Chaturvedi, Siddharth Nandan, Kunal Ravi Singh, Indrajit Shukla, and Satya Veer Singh.

The judicial officers promoted as judges are Dr. Ajay Kumar (II), Chavan Prakash, Divesh Chandra Samant, Prashant Mishra (I), Tarun Saxena, Rajeev Bharti, Padam Narayan Mishra, Laxmi Kant Shukla, Jai Prakash Tiwari, Devendra Singh (I), Sanjeev Kumar, Vani Ranjan Agrawal, Achal Sachdeva, and Babita Rani.

However, the government withheld approval for advocates Adnan Ahmed and Jai Krishna Upadhyay, whose names had also been recommended for elevation. As of September 1, the Allahabad High Court had 84 sitting judges against a sanctioned strength of 160.

Separately, the Centre has cleared the appointment of three judicial officers — Geeta Kadaba Bhartaraj Shetty, Muralidhar Pai Borkatte, and Tyagraj Narayan Inavali — as judges of the Karnataka High Court.