Judgment:
The Court : An utterly disappointing report has been furnished by the Registrar, Original Side. In connection with an application made by the State Government, which was not a party to the suit, it came to light that this suit had been disposed of twice over. In course of an interlocutory application disposed of on October 8, 2004, the suit was treated to be as on the days list of the Interlocutory Court and disposed of.
Unmindful of this order, the department placed the suit in the list of defective suits to be dealt with by the Interlocutory Court earlier this year. When the suit was called on by the Interlocutory Court, since none appeared and the defects had apparently remained for more than six years, it was dismissed for default.
The department was apparently unaware that the suit had been disposed of in the year 2004; or else the matter could not have been treated as a live suit. The Registrar, Original Side, was required to make an inquiry and file a report.
The Registrar has referred to the rules on the Original Side of this Court and the substance of his report is that the right hand did not inform the left hand and as such that the suit was disposed of in 2004 was not known to departmental clerks and officers who had put up the matter for dismissal in the year 2010.
The Registrar has completely missed the point. The report would do a clerical employee proud but does not behove the Registrar, Original Side of this Court who is the chief executive officer on the Original Side. The purpose of the inquiry and the reason why the report was called for was to highlight the defect in the system and for adoption of remedial measures such that the mistake is never repeated.
It would not do merely to say that one chamber clerk had forgotten to inform the department and another chamber clerk had put the matter up a second time without bothering to make any inquiries. The question is why is there no system in place which would ensure that a suit is not treated as a live matter once disposed of.
The ancillary issue is why are the available technologically advanced facilities and the use of computers not made mandatory to guarantee that a suit is not disposed of twice over in the span six years. The ramifications are enormous. If a suit is disposed of, further interlocutory proceedings cannot be instituted. Every interlocutory application has to carry the parent case number. If the computerized system is aware that a suit has been disposed of, the system will reject a subsequent interlocutory application unless the prompt is overridden by a manual command say, in case of an application for review or recall of the order of disposal of the suit.
The information, however, has to reach the computer system that a suit has been disposed of. If a suit has been disposed of but the information is not reached to the computer system, it leaves the door open for mistake, fraud or manipulation. The interlocutory Court may pass an order unaware that the suit has been disposed of and thereby commit an error of jurisdiction. It did not occur to this Registrar that the mistake was colossal.
The report filed is a classic case of the mind not being applied to the matter to plug an obvious loophole in the system that the Registrar, in his administrative capacity, has the wherewithal and authority to correct. The Registrars report is rejected. The Registrar will now show cause to the Interlocutory Court within a fortnight from date as to why the perfunctory report be not considered as dereliction of duty and an attempt to deliberately evade a systemic default pointed out in a judicial order.
This order and any future order in this regard may find place in the Registrars career records. This application will come up three weeks hence when a fresh report of the Registrar addressing the systemic default should be on record.
Urgent certified photocopies of this order, if applied for, be supplied to the parties subject to compliance with all requisite formalities.