Chief Justice of India Surya Kant urged High Courts to prioritise women in judicial appointments. Most courts agreed, amid low female representation, with only 116 of 813 High Court judges being women, highlighting gender imbalance in judiciary.
NEW DELHI: Chief Justice of India Surya Kant has written to the chief justices of all High Courts urging them to give priority to women candidates in judicial appointments.
Sources said that most courts have agreed to the request following the letter.
Sent last week, the communication comes against a backdrop of low female representation in the higher judiciary. Parliamentary figures show only 116 of the 813 working High Court judges are women, or 14.27 per cent of the total strength.
The Supreme Court has only one woman judge at present. The CJI is reported to have stressed that deserving women from the Bar should not be treated as exceptions when considering elevation.
At the district judiciary level, women make up about 36.3 per cent of the working strength, suggesting a larger entry‑level pool. Yet this greater presence at the lower rungs has not led to a proportionate share of appointments to the High Courts and the Supreme Court.
The letter follows recent comments by CJI Kant on bolstering gender diversity on the Bench.
Earlier this month, he had cautioned that if the “pipeline is narrow at source, the Bench cannot later be broad”.
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