New law minister, Ashwani Kumar backs new benches for high-value cases

NEW DELHI: On his first day as India's law minister, Ashwani Kumar threw his weight behind a controversial 2009 bill that sought to have separate dedicated benches at the High Court level to deal with certain commercial cases.

The bill, which allows the creation of one or more such benches to quickly deal with high-value cases, was introduced by the then law minister Veerappa Moily in November 2009 in the Lok Sabha. But it has not been passed yet.

Under the bill, all commercial cases involving Rs 1 crore and above will be dealt directly by these division benches, which would dispose them within 30 days. Any appeal was to be directly made to the Supreme Court.

The cases were to be presided over by judges who were experts on corporate issues. But the bill ran into rough weather, with the opposition calling it "pro-rich," as it accorded "preferential treatment" to the wealthy.

The government had to then refer it to a select committee.

BJP's Arun Jaitley had then claimed that the bill was poorly drafted and would increase problems instead of solving them.

He had said the country was already facing a shortage of judges and any further diversion of existing judges would hurt the non-commercial cases. The CPI had also backed him in the debate on the bill.