Haryana Government has decided to appoint nodal officer (litigation) in all the departments.
The role and responsibilities of nodal officer (NO) would be to consider each and every petition or notice for demand of justice or representation and notice under Section 80 of Code of Civil Procedure (CPC) positively within a period of 30 days from the date of its receipt, and this 30 days period is fixed so that the action taken be concluded and reached to the employee or person who served legal notice or the representationist, said an official spokesman.
There would be a “system of evaluation”. Nodal Officer would give an annual report to the Advocate General about the performance of Advocates who have handled their respective cases. The service contract of Advocates would be extended only if their reports are satisfactory, he said.
He said that all legal notices, petitions, letters from office of Advocate General, Haryana regarding legal matters would be sent to the concerned nodal officer who would also be responsible for bringing it to the notice of concerned Additional Chief Secretary (ACS), Financial Commissioner (FC) or Head of the Department (HoD) for further necessary action to get issued sanction for defence of cases and filing of appeals, writ petitions, civil revisions, RSA, Arbitration cases or any other case by and on behalf of the State Government directly interact with the office of LR or Administrative Secretaries to avoid the procedural delay, which are now being regarded as one of the major reasons of delay in state cases.
On receipt of orders from the courts by nodal officer or Ld. AG officer, the nodal officer would ensure that necessary entries are made in Litigation Management System (LMS) and papers are sent to officer concerned for filing reply, implementation or processing the papers promptly and for sending him a response for uploading on LMS, he said.
The nodal officer must indicate the time lines by which the action has to be taken and in case of inaction, he must take up the matter with officer concerned and ACS, FC or HoD. All judgements of universal application would be endorsed by him in the department for guiding and implementation, the spokesman said.
The nodal officer must carry out a fortnightly review of filing of reply, short reply, written statements, status report or affidavit, implementation of the court orders or directions, filing of LPA, SLP, RSA or FAO, RFA’s and CR’s and status of legal notice of contempt notice of representations. He must be responsible for training of LMS within the Department.
The role and responsibilities of nodal officer would also include endeavouring to see whether litigation between PSUs and Government Public Sector undertaking can be avoided, he said.
The spokesman further said that if litigation cannot be avoided for these PSUs and Government and vice versa then Alternative Dispute Resolution methods like mediations or conciliation must be considered. Section 89 of the C.P.C. must be resorted to extensively. They would also monitor the progress of litigation, particularly to identify the cases in which repeated adjournments are being taken, and to apprise their HoD about the repeated and unjustified adjournments.
The nodal officer would ensure constant monitoring of cases particularly to examine whether cases have gone off track or have been unnecessarily delayed. Apart from this, he would ensure that all relevant date regarding pendency of cases against the government have been entered in the LMS on daily basis and same data be sent to the State Nodal Officer (SNO), Litigation Management System (LMS) on monthly basis, which will be reviewed by the SNO, said he.
Also, the nodal officer would monitor the cases in the High Courts and the cases in the Supreme Court through District Law Officer, the spokesman added.