A group of around 20 lawyers from various Mumbai state bar associations, led by bar council of Maharashtra & Goa member Karan Bhosale, approached the Chief Justice SH Kapadia yesterday (31 August) about the issue.

At contention are the plans to transfer the customary power of the roughly 65 metropolitan magistrates in Mumbai who since the 1950s have been issuing domicile certificates, which are required by Maharashtrians to enrol on professional courses or taking advantage of government welfare schemes.

To be eligible a person needs to prove residence in Maharashtra for 10 years, with the magistrates having issued around 300,000 such certificates last year alone.

“The state government is supposed to do this job,” explained Bhosale, “but in 1950 had told the court probably that they were short of infrastructure and hence the courts had agreed to take on that burden.”

However, the state government has now been planning to transfer this power to the deputy collector’s office, of whom there are three in Mumbai.

“More 10,000 lawyers are partially or completely dependent on this system for work, is what I was told by different representatives of various bar associations,” said Bhosale, adding that particularly junior lawyers and some specialists earned their livelihoods from the work. He said that the aggrieved lawyers claimed that out of the 18,000 to 19,000 lawyers in Mumbai on the rolls, around 55 to 60 per cent carried out domicile certificate work.

The transfer of powers was supposed to take place on 1 September, but following the lawyers petition the Chief Justice has now intervened and postponed the move for two months to investigate the proposal further, Bhosale said.

The petitioner lawyers had also filed a writ petition last Friday to challenge the transfer of work, which they have now agreed to withdraw pending the outcome of the discussions he recounted.

“I told him the reason we were insisting that we wanted the jurisdiction to stay in the magistrates courts, is that there are 65 metropolitan magistrates and only 3 government collectors officers,” Bhosale told Legally India.

“If you transfer this burden onto people who are already burdened with other jobs, sometimes also with election duties, it is very inconvenient for the citizens to approach them and get their certificates urgently if at all required.”

He said that magistrates took between two to eight weeks to issue a certificate, which could be expedited if lawyers argued that the certificate was a matter of urgency.

However, Bhosale explained that the Chief Justice did not agree with these argument and said that the lawyers should approach the state government to discuss the issue.

Lawyers were also apprehending that corruption and malpractice could lead to the powers being misused and lawyers would not be available to represent applicants because government offices were not located near to any metropolitan courts.

Bhosale said that he proposed that the state government could potentially look at alternatives such as locating government officers on the site of the metropolitan courts and that the Chief Justice had “liked” that idea.