Three high court chief justices take the Supreme Court oath, taking the bench to 37

Chief Justice Surya Kant administered the oath of office on Tuesday to three new judges of the Supreme Court. Justices Sunita Agarwal, Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Aparesh Kumar Singh took the oath in the auditorium of the new Supreme Court block. The working strength is now 37. The sanctioned strength is 38.

The Union government notified the elevations on Monday. Law minister Arjun Ram Meghwal announced that the names had been cleared. The Collegium had recommended the three on 28 September. The gap between recommendation and notification was eight days. Family members and lawyers from the Supreme Court and other high courts attended the ceremony.

Agarwal was chief justice of the Gujarat High Court. Upadhyaya was chief justice of the Delhi High Court. Singh was chief justice of the Telangana High Court. All three move from the chief justiceship of a high court to the most junior ranks of the Supreme Court, which is the ordinary path. Gujarat, Delhi and Telangana now need new chief justices. The Collegium has started that process, and interviews are under way.

Agarwal and Upadhyaya come from the Allahabad High Court. Singh comes from the Jharkhand High Court. The parent high court matters for the bar that will follow them, and for the chief-justice vacancies they leave. A chief justice who is elevated does not take the high court's roster with him or her. The acting arrangement in each court starts the day the oath is taken in Delhi.

Agarwal was born on 30 April 1966. She enrolled as an advocate in 1990, became an additional judge of the Allahabad High Court in 2011, and a permanent judge in 2013. She was appointed chief justice of the Gujarat High Court in July 2023. She is the sixth woman ever elevated to the Supreme Court. With her appointment, the number of women judges on the court rises to three. The other two are Justice B. V. Nagarathna, a judge since 31 August 2021, and Justice Venkita Subramani Mohana, appointed on 2 June 2026.

Three women on a bench of 37 is still a small share. The number is also the highest the court has had at one time. Nagarathna is the senior of the three. Her date of appointment, August 2021, puts her ahead of Mohana and Agarwal in the seniority list that determines who presides when the chief justice is not on a bench, and who is in line for the chief justiceship if tenure allows. Agarwal, at 60, has a longer remaining tenure than a judge elevated in their early sixties. Supreme Court judges retire at 65.

The court was one short of sanctioned strength before Tuesday and is one short after it. The thirty-eighth seat remains open. Collegium recommendations do not fill automatically. The government notifies. Monday's notification covered the three names sent on 28 September and did not add a fourth. The next recommendation, if the Collegium makes one, will sit with the law ministry until it is cleared or returned.

The oath is the point at which a high court chief justice becomes a Supreme Court judge for the purpose of benches, rosters and retirement. Until Tuesday morning Agarwal was the chief justice in Ahmedabad, Upadhyaya in Delhi, and Singh in Hyderabad. By the afternoon they were puisne judges in a court whose sanctioned strength they still do not fill. The one empty seat is a fact about the institution, not a comment on the three who were sworn. The Collegium's September list had three names. The government cleared three names. The arithmetic is that simple, and it leaves the court at 37.

PTI photographed the chief justice greeting Agarwal after the oath. The picture is the public record of a ceremony that, in ordinary weeks, would be a short item. This week it lands beside a political argument about the Election Commission, a march on the commission's office, and a court that last week refused to suspend the chief election commissioner. The new judges do not inherit that case. They do inherit a court whose docket includes it. Who sits on which bench is the chief justice's call, made after the oath, not before it.

The three high courts they leave will spend the next weeks under acting chief justices unless the Collegium moves faster than usual. Interviews for the successor posts are already under way, which means the names are being discussed before the vacancies are old. That is the practical consequence of elevating sitting chief justices rather than puisne judges: each appointment in Delhi opens a chief justiceship somewhere else, and the somewhere else has a bar, a roster, and a state government that will notice who arrives.