For want of judges: 224 employees sit idle at Sindh High Court

KARACHI: More than 200 employees of the Sindh High Court have no work until 28 new judges are appointed.

Although they all are attending to their duties regularly with absolute punctuality due to a computerised attendance system, they are considered “spare” according to the commonly used in the high court for staff of a judge who either retires or is sent to any other circuit bench for a specified period.

Each judge is given a staff of eight regular employees, including a Reader (grade 18), stenographer or private secretary (grades 18 to 19), personal assistant or stenographer (grade 17), private secretary or public relations officer (grades 18 to 19), dafatri (grade 4), hawaldar (grades 4 to 6), gunman and a driver (grade 4).

At present, 28 posts for judges are vacant at the high court and the number of idle staff therefore comes to 224.

This number increases as the SHC now has permanent staff at the Larkana and Sukkur Circuit benches. They include deputy registrars, administration officers and other allied staff besides those attached to judicial work.

The bill for the salaries of the staff attached to a judge comes to around 0.5 million rupees a month and about Rs14 million a month for 224 employees.

More than 400 constitutional petitions alone have been filed in the high court in just 40 days of 2012 at an average of 15 petitions per working day. The number of pending cases is nearing 80,000, a high court official said.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 15^th, 2012.