Tamil Nadu constitutes committees to monitor high-stake litigation

The prospect of litigation in India is a nightmare, to say the least.

Indian litigation ecosystem is reeling under tremendous pressure with great lag in litigation process – there are millions of cases pending in different courts and tribunals in India for different reasons.

To overcome this malaise, the Tamil Nadu State Government in a move to facilitate a speedy disposal of high-risk litigation cases has constituted a Litigation Advisory and Oversight Committee (LAOC). This committee consists of retired judges and legal experts as its members (i.e namely Retired judge of Punjab and Haryana High Court K. Kannan and advocates Joseph Prabhakar, K. Ravi and V. Lakshminarayanan), with financial and legal secretary as official members. The underlying intent behind this exercise is to preserve public interest and quick recovery of monies stuck in litigation before different fora.

Such high-risk litigations are primarily related to segments of taxation, land acquisition, and government tenders.

The core idea behind constitution of the LAOC is to come up with different strategies and approaches and appropriate arguments as needed in relation to litigations or anticipated litigations to reduce financial risk and loss. Another prospect is that LAOC should critically identify and monitor such high-risk litigation cases and advise the government with right set of arguments to be submitted before judicial authorities.

Role of LAOC is not just limited to foregoing, but also includes monitoring of cases at every step to come up with course correction, if required and to make certain that concerned authorities are complying with adverse orders to elude any penal punishment or penalties for non-compliance.

Another initiative, at an annual recurring cost of INR 80.80 lakhs, Tamil Nadu Government has also created a Litigation Risk Monitory System (LRMS) with prime responsibility of identifying high risk litigations with involvement of high quantum of public money and notify such cases to nodal and financial departments.

LRMS is instrumental in creating and rolling the process to create right communication channel for having right coordination and consultation amid all stakeholders involved.

High risk litigation is strategically defined as follows:

Taxation matters with monetary value more than INR 100 crores

Judicial matters causing a revenue loss of INR 500 crores or more

Tender matters with a procurement value of more than ?1,000 crores.

As of now, LRMS could deal matters with involvement of all government departments, public sector undertakings, statutory boards, universities, municipal corporations and other local bodies and in course of time cooperative societies and other major societies controlled by the government could come under LRMS.

Both LAOC and LRMS could be instrumental in identifying, addressing, monitoring of high risk litigation matters and compliance with related orders. In simple, both LAOC and LRMS will involve from identifying to closing of such high risk litigations to safeguard public interest and to reduce financial risk and loss to the government.

If these initiatives are successful, other State governments and even the Central government hopefully should take a cue and replicate the success story.

Source : The Hindu

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