The Supreme Court deals with cases involving big money that even the judges say they cannot read — like that cached in foreign banks. It can be used for taxless Budgets for 30 years, according to a Swiss bank director. Politicians who can juggle figures are still debating over the loss in the 2G spectrum scam. These unwieldy numbers look as if a cat had rolled over on the calculator.
In contrast, the court has a low evaluation of its own revenues — going by the fee it charges on those who take up a quarter of its year on just one case. The court sits only around 140 days a year.
One can move the Supreme Court against a high court judgment by paying a court fee of Rs 250. Telecom giants who want to appeal against orders of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India pay Rs 250, if the value of the subject matter is up to Rs 20,000. If the amount is more, the fee is only Rs 5 per thousand for every additional value of Rs 1,000 or part thereof. The upper limit, however, is Rs 2,000.
The court fee fixed for filing appeals against the rulings of customs, excise, income tax appellate tribunals and the Securities Appellate Board is again Rs 250, the price of a plate of samosa a honcho would order. A consumer and the company against which there is a complaint of deficiency of service pay Rs 250 equally.
The fee for filing a civil writ petition is Rs 50. Very often, an appeal is dressed up as a writ petition by raising fundamental rights questions. A former chief justice once said even in tenancy matters, he has seen invocation of the “basic structure theory”, famously propounded in the Kesavananda Bharati case.
A person who wants to transfer a case from one high court to another, or to the Supreme Court, can pay Rs 10 and engage the judges for hours. There are several other services of the top court available for one rupee, if you can find such a coin these days.
Mercifully, criminal writ petitions and appeals are not charged. Most criminals are still not well-heeled politicians and, therefore, those poor souls who have taken to crime because of poverty or a wounded past benefit from this munificence.
The real expense in litigation is the lawyers’ fee. They take it all. This is followed by the expense in the creation of volumes of documents, mainly to impress the judges and browbeat opponents. In the ongoing Vedanta Aluminium case, one party alone brought 10 volumes, standing 1.6 feet tall, with a top-up summary, euphemistically called “convenience compilation”. The lawyer read the compilation in full.
Such high-profile cases take up most of the court time, and fetch miserable fees. The celebrated Vodafone case took three months; also the just-concluded Novartis patent case. The Reliance gas case took as long, like some of the lesser known ones. The court seems to give a cynical twist to the Gandhian motto when it allows long hearings to “wipe every tear from every eye” of cash-rich companies. This practice is perpetuated by default.
None benefits from this, not even the rich clients, except the lawyers. Senior counsel who argue in court charge “reading fee” for supposedly going through the paper mountain. Then, there is a fee for appearance before the judges. When a client asked a senior counsel whether he could reduce his demand, the lawyer replied he could then appear without reading the brief.
During the tedious hearing in the Novartis case, an exhausted senior counsel told the judges in a lighter vein that lawyers charge “sitting fees”, that is to sit through the whole argument running for months, four hours a day. In one venerable high court, lawyers have named it “bottom touch” fees, code-named BT in corridor talk.
The electronic age has enabled us to count energy and time in nano units and charge accordingly. But there is no meter to track the court time taken in meandering arguments. There must be some realistic correlation between the time taken and the court fees charged. Otherwise, hearings will trundle along and the judges’ plight will be little better than that of the Lok Sabha speaker.
Last year, the Supreme Court had pointed out the anomaly in the court fee system. It said in the case, Sanjeev Kumar vs Raghubir Saran, that “a time has come when at least in certain type of litigation, like commercial (arbitration, company affairs, tax), the costs should be commensurate with the time spent by the courts.”
However, the irrational fee structure has only got more ridiculous with creeping inflation. It shows how difficult it is to change dreary dead habits of a congenitally conformist institution like the court, especially if it is sanctified by time and judicial neglect.
