NEW DELHI: With a sizeable percentage of 1.5 million advocates in India feared to be fake, the Supreme Court Thursday expressed serious concerns over the delay in weeding out imposters who dupe gullible litigants and asked Bar Council of India (BCI) to file a status report on the verification drive it had undertaken over nine years ago.
A bench of CJI Sanjiv Khanna and Justices Sanjay Kumar and K V Viswanathan told BCI counsel and advocate R Balasubramanian the process of verification of degrees of lawyers cannot be an endless process. SC had begun the process for verification in 2015, the same year in which BCI chief Manan Mishra had stunned judiciary and lawyers by revealing that as per the apex regulatory body’s estimate, around 20% of lawyers were practicing in courts without valid law degrees. The bench said, “It is a very serious thing. The verification drive must be expedited. There has to be a timeline for this.”
Balasubramanian said the verification of degrees is a time-consuming process as it has to be done state-wise. The SC asked BCI to file an updated status report within eight weeks. BCI sources said the verification drive has found over 1,000 fake lawyers in Delhi and an identical number in Punjab. Sources said recently identified 117 advocates with fake degrees on the rolls of Bar Council of Delhi. A whopping 95 of them had submitted fake degrees from Bundelkhand University.
