SC confirms 14 Addl judges of Bombay HC as permanent judges
   Date :13-Mar-2019
 Rohit Deo, Bharati Dangre,  Manish Pitale

Rohit Deo, Bharati Dangre, Manish Pitale confirmed as permanent judges

The Supreme Court Collegium has recommended to make 14 additional judges of Bombay High Court as permanent judges including three Nagpurians Justice Rohit Deo, Justice Bharati Dangre and Justice Manish Pitale.
The Supreme Court collegium comprising Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Sharad Bobde and Justice N V Ramana on Monday unanimously made this recommendation. All the 14 additional judges were appointed on June 5, 2016 and were working with various benches of Bombay High Court since then.


Bombay High Court has a sanctioned strength of 94 judges including 71 permanent and 23 additional judges. As on date, there are 51 permanent and 19 additional judges and there is a shortfall of 20 permanent judges and 04 additional judges. With this decision, the Bombay High Court will have 65  permanent judges and 06 additional judges. Still there will be 21 vacancies.  The Collegium in its meeting held on March 11 recommended to make Justices Sandeep K Shinde, Rohit Baban Deo, Bharati Harish Dangre, Sarang Kotwal, Riyaz I Chagla, Manish Pitale, S K Kotwal, Arun D Upadhye, Mangesh S Patil, A M Dhavale, P K Chavan, Murlidhar G Giratkar, Mrs Vibha V Kankanwadi and S M Gavhane as permanent judges.


The Collegium of the Bombay High Court vide minutes dated December 7, 2018 had unanimously recommended the above-named Additional Judges for appointment as Permanent Judges of that High Court. Governments of Maharashtra and Goa concurred with the recommendation of High Court Collegium. As per the set procedure, the Supreme Court ascertained suitability of the above-named recommendees for being appointed as Permanent Judges by consulting Supreme Court judges who are conversant with the affairs of the Bombay High  Court.


A sub-committee of the Supreme Court also assessed the judgements delivered by these additional judges during last
two years.  The collegium in its  resolution decided to recommend grant of permanent judgeship to these 14 judges after  carefully scrutinising the  material placed on record,  including the complaints  against some of the additional judges and the observations made by the Department of Justice in the file.


Justice Rohit Deo prior to his elevation as additional judge was the Advocate General of Maharashtra while Justice Bharati Dangre was Principal Law Officer of the Government of Maharashtra for Nagpur bench of Bombay High Court and handled the post of Government Pleader at Nagpur bench with aplomb and Justice Manish Pitale was a well-known Supreme Court lawyer.