The National Lok Adalat, which was scheduled for Saturday, has been postponed.
Sources in the state legal services authority (SLSA) said it would have been impossible to run the Adalat because over 500 judicial officers from Bengal were busy with SIR-related work.
An alternative date has not been announced yet.
If it were held, it would have been this year’s first Lok Adalat. The National Lok Adalat is held on the same day across the country.
Sources in the SLSA said that they were not sure if the Adalat had been pushed back in any other state as well.
“We had to postpone the National Lok Adalat in our state as hundreds of judicial officers are involved in SIR-related work. The patron-in-chief of the state legal services authority (the Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court) felt the judicial officers are already hard-pressed for completing the pending SIR work,” said the SLSA official.
The state’s chief electoral officer, Manoj Agarwal, said on February 28 — the day when the final post-SIR roll was published — that 501 judicial officers from the state were examining the cases under adjudication.
Over 60.06 lakh cases were under adjudication in February. The Supreme Court said on Tuesday that 10.16 lakh of these cases had been decided.
When the last Lok Adalat was held in December, 461 benches were set up across the state. The benches comprised both serving and retired judicial officers.
An SLSA official said nearly 6.06 lakh cases were taken up in the last Lok Adalat, out of which over 5.32 lakh cases were disposed of.
The National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) fixes the dates for Lok Adalat
across the country, and the SLSA organise the sessions in a state.
Non-payment of loan dues, pending utility service bills, compoundable criminal cases that are considered to be of a petty nature, traffic challans and matrimonial disputes (except divorce cases) are some of the cases that can be resolved in the Lok Adalat.