West Bengal Administrative Tribunal
Introduction
The West Bengal Administrative Tribunal, established on January 16, 1995, operates under the Administrative Tribunal Act of 1985. Due to a Court injunction, its effective functioning was delayed, and it could not commence operations until February 1996. The primary objective of the West Bengal Administrative Tribunal is to expedite the resolution of cases about the service matters of State Government Officers and Employees. The Chairman of the West Bengal Administrative Tribunal serves as its head. To enhance its efficiency, a decision has been made to modernize the activities of the Tribunal for smoother and more effective functioning.
Legislative Framework
Rules:
While entertaining cases, the Tribunal mainly deals with service or conditions of service as embodied in the Acts and Rules. Some of these rules are as follow:
- W.B.S.R. Pt I and Pt. II.
- W.B.S.(Classification, Control and Appeal) Rules, 1971
- W.B.S.(Determination of Seniority) Rules, 1981
- Death-cum-Retirement Benefit Rules
- Police Regulation of Bengal, 1943
- Police Regulation of Calcutta and similar other Acts and Rules.
- The West Bengal Administrative Tribunal (Procedure) Rules, 1994
Status of Digitisation
Main Website:
Information related to the tribunal is available on its website (WBAT).
E-filing:
The tribunal does not have the option of e-filing. However, the filing format is available on the downloads section of the website.
Cause list:
The tribunal releases daily cause lists on its website which appears as a pdf report. The WBAT also releases supplementary cause-lists.
As seen in the second image, the website has links to the daily cause list pdf for different benches which contain the case names and the party names. However, the cause lists are not detailed and don’t contain information related to subject matter, counsels appearing for the parties, etc.
ORDERS
Daily orders are mentioned on the WBAT website as seen in image 1 below. A sample of an order is in image 2 below.
Judgments:
The WBAT also releases its judgments on its website. However, the interface and website is not litigant or even research-friendly as users can’t search for the judgments of any case through case number. One has to scroll through judgments uploaded every day.
Video conferencing:
The video conferencing link is available on the main page of the website.
Disposal rate:
The disposal report is available on the WBAT website. It contains links for the monthly disposal report for each year and a table of the total disposed of cases year-wise as per the image below.
The website also contains monthly reports about the status of case disposal. These reports contain details of registered cases and those disposed of. However, no details are provided about the type of cases.
