⚖️ Polity & GovernanceMAINS · GS2.6

Five new Supreme Court judges appointed

The President cleared five appointments to the Supreme Court under Article 124 — four sitting High Court Chief Justices and one Senior Advocate elevated straight from the Bar.

What happened

On 1 June 2026, the Ministry of Law and Justice notified the appointment of five new judges to the Supreme Court of India.
The appointments were made by the President of India through notifications of even number dated 01.06.2026, exercising the power under clause (2) of Article 124 of the Constitution.
Four of the five are sitting Chief Justices of High Courts being elevated; the fifth is a Senior Advocate appointed directly from the Bar.
The five named: Justice Sheel Nagu (CJ, Punjab & Haryana HC), Justice Shree Chandrashekhar (CJ, Bombay HC), Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva (CJ, Madhya Pradesh HC), Justice Arun Palli (CJ, Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh HC), and Smt. Venkita Subramani Mohana (Senior Advocate).
Each appointment takes effect from the date the judge assumes charge of the office, not from the date of the notification.
The notification was signed by the Joint Secretary, Government of India, in the Department of Justice under the Ministry of Law and Justice.

For Prelims

A routine-looking appointment notification is, for an aspirant, a clean peg on which to hang the entire architecture of how Supreme Court judges enter office. The facts below separate the source-anchored (from the notification itself) from the verified background a complete revision note carries.

Constitutional authority: Judges of the Supreme Court are appointed by the President under Article 124(2). The same clause requires the President to consult such judges of the Supreme Court and High Courts as deemed necessary; for any judge other than the Chief Justice of India, the CJI must always be consulted.
The appointing instrument: a warrant of appointment under the President's hand and seal, given effect through a Government notification — exactly the form used here ("Notifications of even number dated 01.06.2026").
Two routes to the Bench, both used here: elevation of a sitting High Court judge or Chief Justice (the four CJs), and direct elevation from the Bar of a distinguished advocate (Senior Advocate V.S. Mohana). The Bar-to-Bench route is constitutionally permitted, though historically rare.
Eligibility (Article 124(3)): an Indian citizen who has been (a) a High Court judge for at least five years, or (b) a High Court advocate for at least ten years, or (c) a distinguished jurist in the President's opinion. The Bar route used here flows from limb (b).
Sanctioned strength: 34 judges including the CJI, fixed by the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Act, 2019, which raised the strength from 31 to 34. A 2026 move to raise it further toward 38 was approved by the Union Cabinet in May 2026 and is being carried through Parliament.
Tenure: a Supreme Court judge holds office until the age of 65 years (contrast: a High Court judge retires at 62). There is no fixed term; only the retirement age and the removal process bound the tenure.
Oath: before entering office, a judge makes and subscribes an oath or affirmation before the President or a person appointed by the President, in the form set out in the Third Schedule — which is why the appointments here run "with effect from the date they assume charge."
Removal: a sitting judge can be removed only by an order of the President after an address by each House of Parliament supported by a special majority on the ground of proved misbehaviour or incapacity (Article 124(4), read with the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968). No judge has ever been removed by this route.

The Collegium — the part not written in the Constitution. The notification records only the President's act, but the substance of who is chosen comes from the Collegium. For Supreme Court appointments the Collegium is the Chief Justice of India plus the four senior-most judges of the Court. Its recommendation is, in practice, binding on the executive. This system is not in the constitutional text; it was built by three judgments:

First Judges Case (1981) — S.P. Gupta v. Union of India — held that "consultation" did not mean "concurrence," giving the executive primacy.
Second Judges Case (1993) — SC Advocates-on-Record Association v. Union of India — reversed this: "consultation" now means concurrence, and the CJI's view (formed in consultation with senior colleagues) is binding. This is the judgment that created the Collegium.
Third Judges Case (1998) — a Presidential Reference under Article 143 — fixed the Collegium's composition for SC appointments at the CJI + four senior-most judges (and CJI + two for High Court appointments).

What the appointment process is — and is NOT. A frequent Prelims trap is to confuse the Collegium with the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC). The NJAC was created by the 99th Constitutional Amendment Act, 2014 (with the NJAC Act, 2014) to give the executive a formal role in appointments. In 2015 the Supreme Court struck down both the amendment and the Act as violating the independence of the judiciary, part of the Constitution's basic structure, and revived the Collegium. So:

It is NOT an appointment by the executive alone — the President acts on the Collegium's recommendation.
It is NOT done through the NJAC — that body was declared unconstitutional in 2015 and never functioned.
It is NOT a process requiring parliamentary approval of each judge — Parliament's role is confined to fixing the number of judges (by ordinary law) and to the removal process.
It is NOT the same as transfer of a judge, which is handled separately under Article 222 and the Memorandum of Procedure.

How a name actually reaches the warrant. The single-line notification compresses a long chain that an answer on the subject should be able to reconstruct. The CJI-led Collegium initiates a recommendation; it travels to the Department of Justice in the Ministry of Law and Justice; the Government may seek inputs (including from intelligence agencies) and may return a name once for reconsideration; if the Collegium reiterates the name, the recommendation is binding and the warrant follows. The President then signs the warrant, the notification is issued, and the appointment crystallises only when the appointee takes the oath and assumes charge — the precise wording used in this notification. The four elevations here therefore represent names that cleared the full Collegium-to-Government loop, and the direct Bar appointment shows the same loop applied to a practitioner who has never held judicial office.

Reading the four High Courts involved. The geographic spread is itself worth noting for a Polity answer on the federal character of the higher judiciary. The four Chief Justices come from the Punjab & Haryana High Court (a common High Court for two States and the UT of Chandigarh), the Bombay High Court (one of the three oldest High Courts, established 1862, with jurisdiction over Maharashtra, Goa and the UTs of Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu), the Madhya Pradesh High Court (seated at Jabalpur), and the High Court of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh (a common High Court for the UT of J&K and the UT of Ladakh after the 2019 reorganisation). Elevations are drawn from across the country's High Courts, not a single region — a working illustration of the all-India character of the Supreme Court.

The wider judicial-officer set this belongs to. Article 124's appointment mechanism sits inside a family of provisions an aspirant should be able to place side by side: the appointment of the Chief Justice of India (by convention, the senior-most judge, appointed by the President); High Court judges under Article 217 (President, after consulting the CJI, the Governor, and the Chief Justice of the High Court); additional and acting judges under Article 224; ad hoc judges of the Supreme Court under Article 127 and retired judges sitting under Article 128; and the appointment of an acting CJI under Article 126. The five appointees here all enter through the Article 124(2) door; four of them vacate the Article 217 office of a High Court Chief Justice as they do so.

For UPSC: SC judges are appointed by the President under Article 124(2) on the Collegium's recommendation (CJI + 4 senior-most judges, fixed by the Third Judges Case, 1998). Direct elevation of a Senior Advocate from the Bar is constitutionally permitted. Retirement age is 65; sanctioned strength is 34 including the CJI (2019 Amendment Act), being raised toward 38. The Collegium replaced — and survived — the NJAC, struck down in 2015 as violating the basic structure.

For Mains

Exemplification

A live, datable instance of the Collegium-to-President appointment route in action — usable to ground any answer on judicial appointments rather than describing the process in the abstract. The mix of four elevations plus one direct Bar appointment illustrates both eligibility limbs of Article 124(3) at once.

Substantiation

Supplies current figures — sanctioned strength of 34 being raised toward 38, retirement age 65 — for answers on judicial capacity, pendency, and the case for expanding the Bench.

Problematisation

The appointment underlines the unresolved tension the Collegium represents: a judge-led process with no statutory transparency mechanism, criticised for opacity and the absence of clear criteria, yet defended as the guarantor of judicial independence after the NJAC was struck down. The thin representation of women and the rarity of Bar elevations both surface here as points to interrogate.

Position

The constitutional position settled by the Second and Third Judges Cases — primacy of the judiciary in its own appointments, with the executive's role limited to processing and a single return-for-reconsideration of a reiterated name.

Way-forward

Feeds debate on a revised Memorandum of Procedure, a permanent secretariat for the Collegium, published criteria, and a balanced expansion of strength to cut pendency without diluting scrutiny.

Deploys into: judicial appointments and the Collegium system · separation of powers and judicial independence · executive-judiciary friction · basic structure doctrine (NJAC) · reform of the appointment process.

Ministry of Law and Justice · 2026-06-01 · PRID 2267354 · PIB source ↗