The Supreme Court of India recently advised the Central Government to allocate additional judicial staff for Debt Recovery Tribunals ( DRT ) when added workload is imposed on the Tribunals in pursuance of retrieving data pertaining to debt recovery, to ensure that the regular functioning of the Tribunals are not affected by the added work.
The observation was made by the Apex Court while adjudicating a Special Leave Petition (Civil) filed by Superwhizz Professionals Pvt. Ltd. against the Union of India and Others. The matter concerned the reassignment of judicial staff from the Vishakhapatnam DRT by the Ministry of Finance to collect a mammoth amount of data on the functioning of DRTs, with respect to numerous cases, including those involving a subject-amount of 100 Crore Rupees.
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Vide Order dated 30 September 2024, the Court noted the inefficiency in the method formulated to retrieve huge amounts of data from the DRT wherein the registrar, stenographers and staff of the DRT were to devote time during regular working hours to collect and collate the required data.
Pursuantly, on 22 November, 2024, the Apex Court had directed the Ministry to devise a Standard Operating Procedure for securing the data from DRTs after noting that the Ministry contended no difficulties in retrieving data owing to the constitution of 29 staff members and 1 presiding officer across the 39 DRTs in India.
The Court had previously come down heavily on the Ministry of Finance for treating the DRT staff as their subordinates to carry out additional work, including directing the Vishakhapatnam DRT to submit the required data within three days through an email dated 09 September, 2024.
A two-judge Bench constituted by Justice Abhay S Oka and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan passed an order asserting “we have perused the affidavit dated 2nd January, 2025 filed by Director, Ministry of Finance, Department of Financial Services, which records that a substantial number of posts sanctioned to different DRTs in the entire country have been filled in. Therefore, no further directions are necessary. However, we make it clear that if the Union of India wants Debt Recovery Tribunals to furnish data as sought in this case, additional hands be provided by the Union of India so that day-to-day functioning of the tribunals do not suffer. With the above observations, SLP is disposed of.”
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The Supreme Court disposed of the Petition, advising the Ministry of Finance to provide extra staff to the Tribunals while calling upon them to collect and collate data, owing to their prior treatment of DRT staff as ‘subordinates’.
Riddhi Sancheti represented the Petitioner, Raj Bahadur Yadav, Chitranshul A. Sinha and Y. Raja Gopala Rao appeared for the Respondents.
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