Pending cases, vacant posts ………Viju B & Sukhada Tatke
Mumbai: The BMC is not merely struggling to initiate punitive against offenders, but also to fight the staggering number of pending cases, which it blames on a shortage of legal officers. Details received under the Right To Information (RTI) Act reveal over 1.5 lakh cases are pending in courts across the city.
As on November 1, 2009, there were 1,65,363 cases pending, of which 1,31,366 (79.44%) are pending with legal assistants in different wards, and 10.36% are pending in the high court. Others are pending in the city civil court, small causes court, criminal court, industrial and tribunal courts. A small fragment (0.4%) is in the Supreme Court.
Officials from the civic legal department said they are under-staffed. “We have approximately 60 lawyers, while we need at least 100 to take care of all the cases in court,’’ said an official. In fact the BMC on Saturday placed an avertisement on its website for assistant legal officers with a degree in law to fill 18 vacant posts.
Additional municipal commissioner Ashish Kumar Singh said the Bar Council of India has proposed the BMC appoint counsels instead of hiring lawyers. “We have contested this and are awaiting a decision, following which we can fill up the vacancies.’’
“Cases range from simple such as drainage, licences for shops and establishments, to more serious ones like illegal construction, health, curbing of malaria and so on,’’ RTI activist Milind Mulay said. Cases pertaining to licences—including issuing licences for shops and establishments—topped the list (69,026), while those on the most burning issue, water, were the least (4).
There are 2,962 pending cases drainage, 4,849 pertaining to malaria (allowing stagnant water at construction sites), and 36,943 cases on violation of health licences where a restaurant or a hotel has neither taken a health licence, nor renewed it.
Officials said the BMC has to take every case to the magistrate, from where the cases often land up in higher courts, dragging on. In 2009, 6,912 cases went in favour of the BMC, while 322 went against the civic body.
The BMC levied fines up to Rs 15.32 crore in the year.