For more transparency and clarity in government litigations, the Centre has directed all ministries to upload details of all court cases involving them on a portal by June 15 else it will not process proposals for legal advice or payment of advocate fees in the absence of the same.
News18 has accessed a letter written by Reeta Vasishta, Secretary of Department of Legal Affairs in the Ministry of Law and Justice, to all secretaries. The Centre has initiated the Legal Information Management and Briefing System (LIMBS), a web-based application to monitor government litigation in various courts and tribunals, in an effort to make the same proactive, transparent and effective. This department also has the mandate to conduct all government litigation.
“With the concerted efforts from all the user ministries/departments, LIMBS as on date has a unified database of 8.26 lakh court cases (including archive cases), 14,204 registered users and more than 21,000 advocates. Entry of cases on the LIMBS portal is a continuous and dynamic process and maintaining the factual accuracy of data from time to time is of prime importance,” Reeta Vasishta has written.
The secretary has emphasised that the LIMBS portal can be best used when all the ministries or departments enter all court cases in which they are a party with complete information in relevant fields. “Therefore, the exercise of entry of all court cases by the concerned user ministries/departments needs to be completed in a time-bound manner and periodically reviewed by nodal officers,” the letter says.
Status Report by June 15
Vasishta has asked all secretaries to now complete the entry of all court cases in the LIMBS application in a time-bound manner and submit the status report to her department latest by June 15. “In the absence of such report, the Department of Legal Affairs may not be in a position to process proposals for legal advice/payment of advocate fees in respect of any case of Union of India which is not entered on LIMBS and in respect of those Ministries/Departments from which status report is not received by the date indicated above,” the letter has said.
Speaking in Bengaluru last week, Chief Economic Advisor V Anantha Nageswaran had said the “government as a litigant should be the last resort”.
In her budget speech earlier this year, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had also stressed on “litigation management” to avoid repetitive appeals by the government departments.
“It has been observed that a lot of time and resources are consumed in filing of appeals which involve identical issues. Taking forward our policy of sound litigation management, I propose to provide that, if a question of law in the case of an assessee is identical to a question of law which is pending in appeal before the jurisdictional High Court or the Supreme Court in any case, the filing of further appeal in the case of this assessee by the department shall be deferred till such question of law is decided by the jurisdictional High Court or the Supreme Court. This will greatly help in reducing the repeated litigation between taxpayers and the department,” the finance minister had said.
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