All 25 High Courts have regular Chief Justices; the Supreme Court still has four empty seats

Every High Court in India now has a sitting Chief Justice. The Centre notified eight appointments on 6 September, covering the seven names the Supreme Court Collegium sent up on 6 and 31 August and a separate vacancy in Chhattisgarh created when that court's Chief Justice retired on 4 September. Law minister Arjun Ram Meghwal listed the moves: Justice Valluri Kameswar Rao of Delhi goes to Patna, Justice Ravindra V. Ghuge of Bombay to Calcutta, Justice Sanjay Kumar Agrawal of Chhattisgarh to Rajasthan, and Justice Mahesh Chandra Tripathi of Allahabad to Bombay.

The Supreme Court is not full. It has 34 judges against a sanctioned strength of 38, four short, even after five elevations in June. A fifth seat opens when Justice Satish Chandra Sharma retires on 29 November. Chief Justice Surya Kant, in office since 24 November 2025, retires on 9 February 2027. The extra four seats exist because President Droupadi Murmu promulgated the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Ordinance on 16 May, lifting the court from 34 to 38 after the Union Cabinet approved the change on 5 May.

The Collegium now sitting with Chief Justice Kant includes Justices Vikram Nath, B.V. Nagarathna, M.M. Sundresh and P.S. Narasimha. Three of those judges are future Chief Justices. Filling the four present vacancies, and the fifth in November, is the next item on their list now that the High Court leadership file is clear.

The High Courts themselves remain thin. Combined sanctioned strength is 1,122. Working strength is 818. That is 304 vacancies, or 27 percent. Twenty-five Collegium recommendations for High Court judges are still with the government, clustered in Delhi, Calcutta, Madras, Punjab and Haryana, and Gujarat. The oldest pending name is advocate Saurabh Kirpal, first sent up by the Delhi High Court Collegium in October 2017.

An ordinance that adds four Supreme Court seats does not by itself cut pendency. Those seats have to be filled, Constitution Benches have to be listed, and the 304 High Court gaps have to shrink if the pipeline of appeals is to ease. Saturday's notifications closed one symbolic file: no High Court is running on an acting head. The file that decides whether the May ordinance means anything in the courtroom is the list of four, soon five, names for the Supreme Court. That list has not been sent.