NEW DELHI: The power ministry is to begin afresh the process for appointing APTEL (Appellate Tribunal for Electricity) chairman after rejecting the two names recommended by a search and selection panel headed by Justice J Chelameswar, who retired as Supreme Court judge on Friday.
APTEL, the appellate body for decisions taken by power and
petroleum regulators, has been without a full-time chairman for the last seven months since Justice Ranjana P Desai completed her term as on November 30 last year. It will be several more months before the body, which hears appeals against orders of regulators on power tariffs etc, may get ahead.
The government had set up the panel under Justice Chelameswar to recommend Justice Desai’s successor. Sources said the panel of names recommended by the Chelameswar committee constituted of retired chief justices of the Bombay and
Karnataka high courts, Justices
Manjula Chellur and S K Mukherjee, respectively, for the post.
According to sources, the ministry rejected the names, citing “certain comments” in the statutory reports required from government agencies for appointments. It was decided that since Justice Chelameswar’s retirement was impending, the law ministry should be asked to discuss with Chief Justice the constitution of a fresh search and selection committee.
Justice Chelameswar was the seniormost judge in the Supreme Court after Chief Justice
Dipak Misra and was among the judges who had held a press conference in June last year against the Chief Justice’s method of allocation of politically sensitive cases.
The Electricity Act of 2003 stipulates that appeals before APTEL should be disposed within a period of 180 days and the body should record reasons in writing for not disposing of the appeals within the said period. There are, however, appeals pending before even after 2-3 years of filing.
At present APTEL’s Bench, 1 is presided over by member (judicial) Justice N K Patil and member (technical) I J Kapoor. Bench 2 is presided over by Justice N K Patil, Member (judicial) and S D Dubey, member (Technical).
The Supreme Court had on June 28 last year pulled up the Centre for “creating problem” by not appointing members in the APTEL and had sought to know by when these appointments would be made. The apex court’s observation came during the hearing of a plea relating to electricity tariff when only one bench of the tribunal was functional due to those vacancies.