SC Notices by E-Mail

With the pendency
of cases refusing to come down, the Supreme Court decided to experiment with
email notices to respondents to cut the delay in the traditional method of
serving notices.

The traditional
method — registered post with acknowledgement due — usually takes a long time
and mostly results in adjournment of hearings because of non-service of the
notices on the
respondents. Chief Justice of India S. H. Kapadia, sitting with Justices K. S.
Radhakrishnan and Swatanter Kumar, realised the difficulty and took immediate
action by asking all the lawyers present in the Court about putting in practice
the serving of notice through emails, at least to start with in commercial
matters. When Attorney General
G. E. Vahanvati and senior advocate Harish Salve welcomed the idea, it took
Justice Kapadia no time to dictate an order to that effect — sending notices
through email in commercial cases.

To help speed up
the process, Vahanvati volunteered to give within two weeks details of email
addresses of every Central Government department, which is the single largest
litigant in the Court. The AG said : “The cabinet secretariat will provide email
addresses of each and every department and regulatory authorities and names of
nodal officers.”

But the
traditional method of serving notices would not be given up. “We hereby direct
the SC registry to send additional notice at the email addresses of respondents,
whenever the advocate . . . furnishes them with a soft copy of the petition or
appeal,” the Bench said.

(Source : The Times of India, dated 27-7-2010)