High court tops women judges’ list

On Tuesday morning when registrar general Mridula Bhatkar was sworn in as a judge of the Bombay High Court, the number of women judges in the high court rose to seven. The Bombay HC can now boast of having the highest number of women judges among the 21 high courts in the country.

Bhatkar was sworn in along with five other sessions court judges — PD Kode, UD Salvi, AR Joshi, SP Davare, and Anand Potdar — by chief justice Swatanter Kumar. Out of the 600 sitting judges of various high courts in the country, only 43 are women.

The Jharkhand High Court is the only one presided over by a woman chief justice — Gyan Sudha Misra. The Supreme Court at present does not have any woman judges.
On the gender scale, the Delhi High Court comes a close second with six women judges on the bench. The Madras and Madhya Pradesh high courts each have four woman judges. Six high courts, including Chattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, and Sikkim, have no women judges.

The news of Bombay HC topping the gender chart has elated the HC’s sole lady senior counsel Rajni Iyer. “I have always believed that we are lawyers who happen to be women.

“The women judges have been elevated because of their competence. I do feel that women lawyers still have to break additional barriers to reach the bench but the good news is that more women are overcoming the odds,” Iyer said. Judges must encourage women lawyers thereby providing a security cover for their growth, she said.

Advocate Soma Singh said the Bombay HC has set a great example for the rest of the country. Judges must encourage women lawyers to apply for the senior counsel designation, she said.