Lawyers in the Salt Lake court complex have been abstaining from work and not taking up any case since Monday morning apparently because the sole photocopy machine in the court’s copying section has stopped working.
The Salt Lake court’s Bar association — Bidhannagar Bar Association — has around 400 lawyers as members and none of them has appeared in the court since Monday. The lawyers have been demanding that the defunct photocopier be replaced immediately and more such machines procured.
The Salt Lake court complex in Mayukh Bhavan, opposite Central Park, houses an ACJM court, the court of the civil judge and a special court.
According to an estimate given by the Bar association, more than 1,000 certified copies related to various litigations are picked up by lawyers daily from the copying section.
“Each copy has anything between eight and 300 pages. One can imagine the number of pages the lawyers collect from the copying section daily. The entire section has only one machine and that has broken down. We have been demanding that the machine be replaced. This (abstention from work) is a mark of our protest,” said Soma Mondal, secretary, the Bidhannagar Bar Association.
The photocopier, Mondal said, has been defunct for two weeks.
Multiple meetings in person and over the phone were held between the lawyers and the ACJM as well as the district judge between Monday and Tuesday, but no resolution was reached till late on Tuesday, a Bar association official said.
According to Mondal, they have told ACJM Subhankar Biswas to allow petitioners to plead their cases till the protest is on.
Asked if the Bar considered the abstention unbecoming of lawyers as litigants are suffering, Soumyajit Raha, executive committee member of the Bar association, said they felt their demands are justified and lawful.
“Our demand is lawful and justified as we have been suffering for long. We have also petitioned the ACJM to allow litigants to plead their cases as we will not resume work till the copier is replaced and the section gets more machines,” Raha told The Telegraph on Tuesday.
A senior official of the court said meetings with the Bar association had been called and the lawyers had been told that the machine would be replaced as soon as possible.
