Bengaluru Urban DC needs 10 years to clear case pile-up

It will take more than 10 years to dispose of cases on land disputes and other issues that are pending in the Bengaluru Urban Deputy Commissioner’s court going by the current rate, government data show.

As of now, 9,408 cases are pending with Bengaluru Urban DC — this is 40% of all the cases in the state. Most of them are related to encroachments and land disputes, apart from Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) cases, RTI appeals and consumer-related issues. Around 500-600 cases are added to the long list every year and a similar number of cases are disposed of every month.

Officials, however, maintain that the actual number of pending cases is around 4,000 and blamed a technical glitch for inflated figures.

Last week, the government created the post of Special Deputy Commissioner-3 expressly to help clear the huge pendency.

Statewide figures revealed during the recent meeting of DCs and zilla panchayat CEOs show 23,197 cases were pending in DC courts. After Bengaluru Urban, the highest pendency is in Bengaluru Rural (1,658) followed by Chitradurga (1,598).

While the time required to dispose of all cases — provided no new cases are added — is 10.6 years for Bengaluru Urban, it is 1.11 years for Bengaluru Rural and 1.10 years for Chitradurga.

Speaking to DH, Bengaluru Urban Deputy Commissioner J Manjunath said that the number of pending cases was around 4,000.

“While tabulating the number of cases from the Revenue Court Case Monitoring System software, several disposed cases were also taken into account,” he said, responding to a query on a large number of pending cases.

Currently, Bengaluru Urban district — which already has two special DCs with one more added now — is disposing of the highest number of cases.

“We have disposed of 600 cases in the last three months despite their cumbersome nature,” he said.

However, the recent Covid guidelines have reduced the number of cases disposed of due to various restrictions.

The appointment of a new Special DC will help in clearing the pending cases, he said, adding that it would help in the distribution of workload among the four DCs for the district.

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