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Krishan Mahajan
The Income Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT) is in serious trouble. Set up by the British as a model interdisciplinary body consisting of judicial and accountant members on each bench, the tribunal's judicial component has been effectively undermined by politicians and administrators. The Supreme Court is already faced with the problem of accommodation for the Tribunal benches through-out the country, as also for its members. But despite the public interest litigations filed by the Gujarat and Rajasthan lawyers and chartered accountants, the basic question remains unaddressed. This is the issue of relationship between the controlling ministry of the Union Government and the tribunals.
By an amendment in the 1998 Finance Act, in the Union Law Ministry, which is the administrative ministry of the ITAT, made a three-year old deputy secretary of the Indian Legal Service eligible for selection as a judicial member of the tribunal. The tribunal can now be filled up with file-pushing secretaries as judges even thoughthey have never seen the inside of any court, leave aside having practised in one.
That this is possible is evident from the controversy surrounding the selection of the CEGAT registrar B.K. Mitra as a member of the ITAT. The issues in his case are: whether a registrar of a national tribunal can be equated to a lawyer or a judge? Whether the years spent as a registrar of a national tribunal can be termed as years of lawyering in the courts and whether the administrative ministry can shortlist and smuggle such a name into the list of eligible candidates put up before the selection team headed by a Supreme Court.
This becomes possible because politicians and administrators having a vested interest in the control over appointments to the national tribunals have not bothered to put into the relevant statutes the duties of the administrative ministry. The mindset that controls the tribunals has nothing judicial about it. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court after having declared that it has the power to lay downguidelines till the time Parliament makes a law in this area has so far chosen not to address the issue.
The working of the mindset is visible in the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal in the Capital itself, located in Lok Nayak Bhawan. The daily practising lawyers and chartered accountants must queue up every morning to get a Union Home Ministry pass for entry to the courtrooms. The politicians and IAS officers have already reduced the ITAT to a government office. Even new members of the tribunal are not spared the ordeal of being asked to show their identity card.
As you clutch your pass of entry after a long wait in the queue and enter the court, the power of the ministry is visible. Torn, blackened curtains, broken window panes, loose electrical wires and pipes, dead air conditioners and coolers, broken chairs... The files are scattered all over the floor since there are no built-in almirahs to keep them and anyone can walk out with any court file. The court rooms have no sets of income tax reports andthere are no electronic display boards to inform the public or the practitioners about which item is going on in which of the six courts.
The space for functioning courts cannot be there because the politico-administrative mindset has fixed space norms on the basis of a 1975 Urban Ministry letter that calculates space for government offices and not for courts with libraries, record rooms and chambers for members where they can think and work.
Of course no one has bothered to update these norms to 1999 or provide space in them for the practitioners and the litigants. Yet the Law Ministry collects a ``fee'' on each appeal ranging from Rs 500 to Rs 10,000. In violation of these norms, 5,000 sq ft of the tribunal's space has been given to the income tax department which, ironically, has rooms better than the courts.
The secretaries of the members are huddled in one room with no intercom. Hence every time a member wants to say something to his secretary he must walk down the corridor. One telephone is sharedby three members and the administrative staff on deputation need a wholesale uplifting of levels of work.
The Union Law Minister Ram Jethmalani on July 15, while being felicitated by the ITAT bar, promised to do something about it by declaring the well-known legal position of tribunals of justice. The problem is that law ministers come and go. The secretaries will remain. The secretaries are wholly unaccountable for what they administer, including the tribunals. Will the apex court step in to lay down the rule that an administrative ministry is meant to advance and not impede the work of a tribunal as also lay down accountability guidelines for the ministry so as to ensure transparency?
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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