21 additional judges of three high courts were granted extension through notifications by the Ministry of Law and Justice after receiving the first set of recommendations from the collegium reported Business Standard.

Additional judges from Calcutta high court granted extension for three months from 30 October were Samapati Chatterjee, Sahidullah Munshi, Subrata Talukdar, Tapabrata Chakraborty, Arindam Sinha, Arijit Banerjee and Debangsu Basak.

Additional judges from the Karnataka high court granted three months extension with effect from 24 October are Arakalagudu Venkataramaiah Chandrashekara, Rathnakala, Budihal Rudrappa Bhimappa, Pradeep Dattatraya Waingankar and Koratagere Narasimha Murthy Phaneendra.

The additional judges from Telangana high court granted three month extension with effect from 23 October are Bulusu Siva Sankara Rao, Mandhata Seetharama Murti, Saripella Ravi Kumar, Upmaka Durga Prasad Rao, Talluri Sunil Chowdary, Mallavolu Satyanarayana Murthy, Misrilal Sunil Kishore Jaiswal, Ambati Shankar Narayana and Anis.

From 13 April to 16 October this year, there was no system in place to appoint judges in India leading to increase in vacancies in the courts as the collegium system was replaced by NJAC Act, which was under scrutiny by Supreme Court.

Realizing the shortage of number of judges at various high courts, on 18 October the Law Ministry sent files of the additional judges to the collegium for its immediate consideration, it was reported. On the recommendation of the collegium, the extension or ‘reappointment’ was cleared by the government and sent to the President for his assent and later notified.