Supreme Court imposes 25K Cost On NCB

WHY IN THE NEWS?

• The Supreme Court imposed costs on the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) for the delay of the Special Leave Petition, specifying that the delay is to be reimbursed by the officer(s) responsible for the delay.
• Taking note of the unreasonable delays that point to total inefficiency in the administration of legal departments, in a petition led by the NCB, the bench of Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul & Hrishikesh Roy issued an order challenging a bail order on account of provisions under Section 37 of the NDPS Act, arguing that in such cases there is a ban on bail, especially when large quantities of bail are given.

WHAT DID THE COURT OBSERVE?

• The Court noted that while it did what the Additional Solicitor General advanced and some substance in the merits of it, there was a delay of 254 days in the case that it preferred to deal with first. For the petitioner, this led to a threshold bar. Earmarking the cases as 'Certificate Cases,' the court observed that the object is to secure a dismissal certificate from the Supreme Court to silence the issue, and therefore to state that nothing will be done after the appeal was rejected by the Supreme Court. It was an attempt to complete formality to save the skin of the officers who might be in default to be followed on time in such a process.

WHAT DOES CONDONATION OF DELAY SHOWS?

• A reading of the application for condonation of delay reveals that the request to file the SLP was submitted on May 2, 2019, and was forwarded to the Ministry in July 2019-after two and a half months-from the officer of the Deputy Legal Advisor, NCB headquarters. The Kolkata Region sent the drafted SLP and additional documentation to the NCB headquarters on 26 September 2019, the vetted SLP was only received on 22.11.2019 i.e. after approximately two months in the Central Agency Section.
• The Supreme Court opined "We have little question that officers were excessively incompetent in handling the department's legal relations," the Court stated. Thus, noting that it was not just in the instant case that, despite undue pause, cases came before the court from different government bodies, the Court observed that it demonstrated utter inefficiency in the operation of their legal departments."Similarly, the legal department of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) should respond to an even more sad situation"-.
• In this sense, the court noted that it had recently raised this issue in a recent order passed in the case of Madhya Pradesh V. Bheru Lal State, in which it noted that "pedantic excuses are no longer admissible given the technology that is now supporting government agencies."