india

Updated: Apr 10, 2019 15:06 IST

Senior judge of Allahabad high court, Justice Vikram Nath, was on Wednesday appointed as the first Chief Justice of Andhra Pradesh High Court.

A collegium of Supreme Court comprising Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi and judges S A Bobde and N V Ramana recommended the name of Justice Nath as the chief justice of the AP High Court.

Fifty-six-year-old Justice Nath, who obtained a law degree in 1986, enrolled himself as a practising lawyer in Allahabad in March 1987. He was appointed an additional judge of the Allahabad High Court in 2004 and was elevated to the post of a permanent judge in 2006.

The new high court for Andhra Pradesh was created on January 1 this year, following the bifurcation of a combined high court for AP and Telangana, which had been operating from Hyderabad since June 2, 2014, when the two Telugu states got separated.

Since the bifurcation of the high court, Justice C Praveen Kumar had been functioning as acting chief justice of Andhra Pradesh High Court. Now, Justice Nath will be taking over as the first full-fledged chief justice.

Apart from the chief justice, Andhra Pradesh High Court has 15 judges. At present, the high court is functioning from a newly built interim judicial complex at Nelapadu in the new capital city region of Amaravati.

The AP government is constructing an exclusive Justice City as part of Amaravati for the judiciary, which is expected to be completed in two years. Once it is completed, the high court and all its subordinate courts would move into the Justice City.

Before the formation of Andhra Pradesh on November 1, 1956, there were two separate high courts for the erstwhile Hyderabad and Andhra states in Hyderabad and Guntur respectively. While Hyderabad state was formed after its merger with Indian Union in 1948, the Andhra state with Kurnool as the capital was carved out of Madras Presidency in 1953.

After the merger of Hyderabad state and Andhra state to form Andhra Pradesh, the Andhra High Court had been shifted to Hyderabad to become a common high court. Following the state’s bifurcation into Telangana and Andhra Pradesh in June 2014, the high court, too, was divided again.