Justice comes closer to Rayalaseema

The Andhra Pradesh government has expedited the process of setting up the High Court Bench in Kurnool and has identified buildings to accommodate 15 judges. It may be recalled that the State Assembly had passed a unanimous resolution for the setting up of a High Court Bench in Kurnool in November 2024.

The government’s decision to set up a Bench in Kurnool has been welcomed by everyone in the Rayalaseema region, particularly those from the legal fraternity, especially given that the previous YSR Congress Party government, which had proposed Kurnool as the judicial capital, had failed to keep this promise due to various legal issues.

Discontented with the YSRCP government, the legal fraternity had viewed its three-capital proposal as a political move to derail the grand project of Amaravati, the capital city mooted by N. Chandrababu Naidu when he was in power between 2014 to 2019. While former Chief Minister Jagan Mohan Reddy had promised that the three capitals proposal would decentralise development, he was unable to implement it. Now, a High Court Bench in Kurnool will decentralise judicial administration since cases from Rayalaseema constitute an estimated 33% of all cases in the Andhra Pradesh High Court.

Unlike shifting the entire High Court from Amaravati to Kurnool, setting up a Bench is a relatively easy process. Though a virtual mode of hearing had been made available earlier, lawyers from Rayalaseema still had to travel for more than 8-9 hours to file mandatory petitions and regular appeals. Now, petitioners from the four undivided Rayalaseema districts of Kurnool, Kadapa, Anantapur and Chittoor will be able to approach the Bench easily, instead of travelling to Amaravati.

The Bench will serve other purposes too. As there will be cases pertaining to service matters and labour laws, branches of government departments too will soon come up in Kurnool, taking administration nearer to the people. As a senior High Court lawyer explained, both justice and administration will be brought closer to the people.

The setting up of a Bench is also expected to spur commercial activity in the region. Kurnool is connected to other regions by road, rail, and air. The presence of judges and government officials, and visits by senior lawyers from various parts of the country, will propel the growth of the region. The hospitality sector is expected to flourish in the region and add to the potential of the tourism sector in and around Kurnool.

Meanwhile, advocates from Visakhapatnam have also brought to the fore the demand for a Bench in Visakhapatnam. Advocates from north Andhra say that this demand has persisted since 1993 and that they too will raise their pitch for a Bench. They argue that Visakhapatnam houses several educational institutions for the legal fraternity, such as the Damodaram Sanjivayya National Law University, the Andhra University College of Law, and the GITAM School of Law, and therefore merits a Bench. The Visakhapatnam Bar Association has more than 5,000 advocates, including 1,200 women.

Whether the government considers the demand or not, the proposal is unlikely to be opposed by the legal fraternity from other regions. This is because there are States which have multiple Benches of the High Court. In Karnataka, the principal seat is located in Bengaluru, while additional Benches can be found in Dharwad and Gulbarga. In Madhya Pradesh, the principal seat of the High Court is in Jabalpur while additional Benches are located in Gwalior and Indore.

The NDA government will find itself in an advantageous position if it completes the process of setting up the Kurnool Bench. The previous government’s announcement that the High Court and other judicial institutions will be shifted to Kurnool had raised the hopes of the people, but nothing finally came of it. This could also be one of the reasons why last year, in the Assembly elections, the voters of Rayalaseema gave the NDA a clear mandate. The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) alone clinched 42 Assembly seats in the region that had, until then, been a stronghold of the Congress and later the YSRCP. The TDP and its allies can now further cement their position in the region by developing it in various ways. The setting up of the High Court Bench is a crucial first step towards this aim.