Q1.
Several High Courts mentioned in the table have more than one bench. Explore which High Courts have more than one bench with the help of your teachers.
Answer
Start by being clear what a bench means here. Every High Court has a principal seat — the main city where it sits. Some High Courts also sit permanently at one or more other places; each such additional sitting place is called a bench. A person living in that region can file and argue the case at the bench instead of travelling to the principal seat.
How to find the answer — the method:
- Shortlist from the chapter’s own table (pages 134–135). Two clues in the table point to a likely bench:
- the High Court covers more than one State or Union Territory — for example Bombay (Maharashtra, Goa, and the UT of Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu), Gauhati (Assam, Nagaland, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh), Calcutta (West Bengal and the UT of Andaman & Nicobar Islands), Kerala (Kerala and the UT of Lakshadweep), Madras (Tamil Nadu and the UT of Puducherry), Punjab & Haryana (Punjab, Haryana and the UT of Chandigarh), and Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh;
- the High Court covers a single but very large State, where a citizen at the far end would otherwise have to cross the whole State — for example Allahabad (Uttar Pradesh), Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Karnataka.
- Verify each one. Open the official website of that High Court — every High Court has one, and the chapter notes on page 138 that details of cases are available on the website of each court. The home page or the ‘About Us’ / ‘Jurisdiction’ page states the principal seat and any benches. Your school library’s general knowledge yearbook and your teacher can confirm the same.
- Record it in a table with three columns: High Court · Principal seat · Bench or benches. Add a fourth column, Why a bench was needed there, and fill it from the two clues above.
- Mark them on an outline map of India. Put a filled dot for each principal seat and a hollow dot for each bench, then join each bench to its principal seat with a line. The map makes the pattern obvious at a glance.
Why benches exist at all: the chapter says the subordinate judiciary matters because it is there that the judiciary comes in close contact with the people. A bench extends the same logic upward. A High Court’s power runs over the whole of its territory, but a court is useless to someone who cannot afford to reach it. Creating a bench does not create a second High Court — it is the same High Court sitting at another place, so a litigant a thousand kilometres from the capital gets the same court without the journey.
Check it yourself: find out first whether your own High Court has a bench, and if it does, which districts are attached to it. Then work out which sitting place your district falls under. That single fact tells you where a case from your town would actually be heard.