In a move that shook the ethos and established traditions of one of the crucial three pillars of the democratic apparatus, the Indian Judiciary, four most senior judges of the Supreme Court took to the public to address grievances that faced the institution. Supreme Court senior-most judges addressing the media on Friday, January 13, 2017 (Photo: Reuters) After the letter that honourable Justice J Chelameshwar, Justice Rajan Gogoi, Justice Madan B Lokur and Justice Kurian Joseph collectively wrote to Chief Justice of India Dipak Mishra went addressed, the top judges relied on the fourth pillar to bring forth issues that in the words of the judges themselves “adversely affected the overall functioning of the justice delivery system”. ALLOTMENT OF CASES The judges said that the CJI is only first among equal, nothing more or nothing less. They expressed concern over CJI’s way of assigning cases to the benches and deciding the composition of the same. Without going specific,
The constitution of India calls India an indestructible union of destructible states. The new Goods and Services Tax (GST) strengthens this notion of an indestructible union. The GST is a destination based indirect tax inserted in concurrent list of Schedule 7 in the constitution that will replace multiple cascading indirect taxes applied by the center and the states. It has been added in Article 246A through 101 st constitutional amendment act. The GST will subsume central taxes such as central excise duty, service tax, central surcharges and cesses and state taxes such as state sales tax, state VAT, luxury tax, entry tax, entertainment and amusement tax, taxes on lotteries, gambling and betting and state surcharges and cesses. The revenue of the tax would go to the state where the good originates. The GST council has come out with a multi-tiered tax structure – 0% on products on consumer price basket including foodgrains, 5% on items of mass consumption like spices and mustard