INVC,,
Kolkata,,
The Vice President of India Shri M. Hamid Ansari has said that the blueprint for our nation building exercise as enunciated in the Constitution is premised on bringing about social and economic changes while upholding the dignity of the individual in all its dimensions and empowering the citizens to better their condition in life. Delivering inaugural address at the “Sesquicentenery celebrations of Calcutta High Court” in Kolkata today, he has opined that our Judiciary has made the dignity of the individual, secured by fundamental rights and guided by directive principles, a part of the basic structure of the Constitution.
Shir Ansari believed that the legal profession must reclaim the hallowed ground that it occupied during our freedom struggle and in the early years of the fledgling republic. The need for introspection is imperative; it should lead to an ethical renewal in actual practice in terms of the canons of judicial ethics so eloquently enunciated by the former Chief Justice R.C. Lahoti in February 2005 in the First M.C. Setalvad Memorial Lecture. Judicial processes and procedures must be streamlined, infrastructure should be strengthened, and the entire chain of subordinate judiciary must be subjected to an overhaul and renewal. Let us all say NO to excessive adjournments; say NO to long-winded oral arguments by counsels; say NO to delays in filling up vacancies of judges; and discourage, even penalize, compulsive litigation tendencies, whether of the State or of citizens.
