⚖️ Polity & GovernanceMAINS · GS2.6 · GS2.1

Three High Court Chief Justices appointed to the Supreme Court

The Chief Justices of the Gujarat, Delhi and Telangana High Courts are elevated; two of the three have Allahabad as their parent High Court.

What happened

The President of India appointed three serving High Court Chief Justices as Judges of the Supreme Court.
Justice Sunita Agarwal, Chief Justice of the Gujarat High Court (parent High Court: Allahabad).
Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya, Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court (parent High Court: Allahabad).
Justice Aparesh Kumar Singh, Chief Justice of the Telangana High Court (parent High Court: Jharkhand).
The notification is issued by the Ministry of Law and Justice and recites only the constitutional power, the names and the courts.

For Prelims

Article 124(2): every Judge of the Supreme Court is appointed by the President by warrant under hand and seal after consultation with such judges of the Supreme Court and the High Courts as the President may deem necessary.
The collegium: for a Supreme Court appointment it is the Chief Justice of India and the four senior-most judges of the Court. For a High Court appointment it is the CJI and the two senior-most judges.
The Judges Cases: First (1981) gave primacy to the executive; Second (1993) made "consultation" mean concurrence and created the collegium; Third (1998), on a Presidential Reference, fixed the collegium’s composition.
NJAC: the 99th Constitutional Amendment and the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act, 2014 were struck down in 2015 for violating the basic structure, restoring the collegium.
Memorandum of Procedure: the document governing the steps from collegium resolution to warrant. The government may return a recommendation once; if the collegium reiterates it, it is binding.
Strength and tenure: 34 judges including the CJI, under the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Act, 1956 as amended in 2019. A Supreme Court judge retires at 65; a High Court judge at 62.
Removal: only by an order of the President after an address by each House by a special majority in the same session, on proved misbehaviour or incapacity - Article 124(4) read with the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968.
Parent High Court: the High Court a judge was first appointed to. Collegium practice treats representation of different High Courts, and of regions, as a relevant consideration, which is why the notification records it.

For UPSC: Judicial appointments are the single most reliably examined topic in the judiciary-executive relationship, and a notification like this is the hook on which the whole chain hangs - Article 124, the three Judges Cases, the NJAC judgment, the Memorandum of Procedure and the vacancy problem. Keep the names and the parent High Courts; the structure is what the questions are about.

What it is NOT: The notification gives no date for the collegium resolution and no indication of how long the recommendation was with the government, which is the measurable part of the appointments controversy. No vacancy position before or after, so the Court’s working strength against the sanctioned 34 is not stated. No seniority list or inter se seniority of the three. Nothing on the regional or High Court composition of the Court that these appointments change. And no reasons: the collegium publishes resolutions separately, and a government notification of this form never carries them.

For Mains

Syllabus: GS2.6 · GS2.1 · Linkage L1

Anchor

The President has appointed three serving High Court Chief Justices as Judges of the Supreme Court: Justice Sunita Agarwal of the Gujarat High Court, Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya of the Delhi High Court and Justice Aparesh Kumar Singh of the Telangana High Court. The notification from the Ministry of Law and Justice is three sentences long and records their parent High Courts: Allahabad for the first two, Jharkhand for the third.

Substantiation (data)

The constitutional chain behind those three sentences is long. Article 124(2) vests the appointment in the President after consultation; the Second Judges Case of 1993 read consultation as concurrence and created the collegium; the Third Judges Case of 1998 fixed it as the Chief Justice of India with the four senior-most judges. The 99th Amendment and the NJAC Act were struck down in 2015. Sanctioned strength is 34 including the Chief Justice, set by statute and last raised in 2019.

Position

The detail the notification does carry is the parent High Court, and it is carried because it matters. Collegium practice treats representation of different High Courts as a relevant consideration, so recording that two of three elevations come from Allahabad is not clerical. It is the one piece of information in the document that bears on the composition question - whether the Court draws from across the country or disproportionately from a few large High Courts.

Counterpoint

Everything that is actually contested about judicial appointments is absent by design. No date for the collegium resolution and no record of how long it sat with the government, which is where the friction between the two branches is measured. No vacancy position, so the Court’s working strength against 34 cannot be read. No reasons for these three over others. A system whose defenders call it transparent produces notifications that disclose names and nothing else.

Way forward

The reform proposals that survive the NJAC judgment are procedural rather than structural: a published Memorandum of Procedure settled between the government and the collegium, time limits on each stage, a secretariat to process recommendations, and published criteria. None requires a constitutional amendment, and the Memorandum has been unsettled since 2015, which is why appointments still move at a pace nobody can account for.

Conclusion

A routine notification that is the visible end of the most contested process in Indian constitutional practice. The names and courts are worth keeping; the three sentences are worth noticing for what a system defends as transparent chooses not to say.

Deploys into: Judicial appointments and the collegium · Separation of powers and the Judges Cases · NJAC and the basic structure doctrine · Judicial vacancies and pendency

Ministry of Law and Justice · 2026-10-05 · PRID 2319337 · PIB source ↗