On September 5, 2026, the Ministry of Law and Justice notified the appointment of Chief Justices to eight High Courts in a single stroke — Patna, Calcutta, Chhattisgarh, Bombay, Punjab & Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh. With that notification, every one of India’s 25 High Courts now has a full-time, permanent Chief Justice for the first time in months. As recently as July 2026, seven High Courts — nearly a third of the country’s High Court system — were being run by Acting Chief Justices, an arrangement the Constitution treats as a stopgap, not a steady state. The story of how the country got there, and how it climbed back out, says as much about the mechanics of judicial appointments in India as it does about the immediate news.

The Vacancy Wave: How a Third of India’s High Courts Lost Their Chief Justices

The vacancies did not arise from any single failure. Bar & Bench’s July 2026 tally identified seven High Courts functioning under Acting Chief Justices: Bombay (Justice R.V. Ghuge), Calcutta (Justice Tapabrata Chakraborty), Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh (Justice Sanjeev Kumar), Madhya Pradesh (Justice Vivek Rusia), Patna (Justice Sudhir Singh), Punjab & Haryana (Justice Ashwani Kumar Mishra), and Rajasthan (Justice Sanjeev Prakash Sharma).

Two forces converged to produce this pile-up. The first was the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Act, 2026, which raised the Supreme Court’s sanctioned strength from 34 to 38 judges, retrospective to May 16, 2026, the date the enabling ordinance was first notified. The expansion triggered a fresh round of elevations to the apex court, several of them sitting High Court Chief Justices — and when a Chief Justice moves to the Supreme Court, their former court falls to an Acting Chief Justice pending a fresh Collegium recommendation. The second force was the ordinary churn of retirements: Chief Justices reach the mandatory retirement age of 62 on a rolling basis, and a cluster happened to retire in mid-2026 before successors could be cleared.

The Constitution anticipates exactly this gap. Article 223 provides that when the office of Chief Justice of a High Court is vacant, “the duties of the office shall be performed by such one of the other Judges of the Court as the President may appoint for the purpose.” An Acting Chief Justice exercises the full administrative authority of the office — including the crucial power, as master of the roster, to constitute benches and allocate cases — but the position is explicitly transitional. Article 223 does not contemplate an Acting Chief Justice as a long-term substitute for a permanent appointment made through the ordinary Article 217 process.

The Collegium Process: From Recommendation to Notification

Filling eight Chief Justice posts runs through a specific constitutional process. Under Article 217, as interpreted by the Supreme Court’s Second and Third Judges Cases, the Chief Justice of India, in consultation with a Collegium of senior Supreme Court judges, recommends candidates to the Union government, which is expected to notify the appointments without substantive delay.

In this cycle, the Collegium headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant moved in two batches. The first four recommendations came in early August 2026, covering Patna, Calcutta, Bombay, and Punjab & Haryana. A second batch followed later in August, covering Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh.

The Ministry of Law and Justice notified all eight appointments together on September 5, 2026. The final list is a useful snapshot of how the Collegium’s convention of appointing “outsider” Chief Justices — judges from a different High Court than the one they will head — continues to operate in practice:

High Court New Chief Justice Previous Court
Patna Justice Valluri Kameswar Rao Delhi High Court
Calcutta Justice Ravindra Vithalrao Ghuge Bombay High Court
Chhattisgarh Justice Krushna Ram Mohapatra Orissa High Court
Bombay Justice Mahesh Chandra Tripathi Allahabad High Court
Punjab & Haryana Justice Ashwani Kumar Mishra Punjab & Haryana High Court (confirmed in place)
Madhya Pradesh Justice Alpesh Yeshvant Kogje Gujarat High Court
Rajasthan Justice Sanjay Kumar Agrawal Chhattisgarh High Court
Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh Dr. Justice Pushpendra Singh Bhati Rajasthan High Court

A ninth move, not itself a Chief Justice appointment, filled in behind the reshuffle: Justice Manash Ranjan Pathak was transferred from the Orissa High Court to the Gujarat High Court, backfilling the seat Justice Kogje’s elevation to Madhya Pradesh left open. Justice Agrawal took oath as Chief Justice of Rajasthan on September 7, and Justice Bhati took oath in Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh on September 9 — both within days of the September 5 notification, a contrast with earlier episodes where Collegium recommendations sat with the government for months before being cleared.

The Rajasthan Controversy: Why One Appointment Was Not Routine

The Rajasthan appointment, in particular, was not simply backlog-clearing. It followed a public controversy over the conduct of the outgoing Acting Chief Justice, Justice Sanjeev Prakash Sharma. Between August 2 and August 17, 2026, Supreme Court judge Justice Sandeep Mehta — whose parent High Court is Rajasthan — wrote three separate letters to the Chief Justice of India, reportedly accusing Justice Sharma of corruption, nepotism, favouritism, and misuse of administrative powers, and specifically urged the appointment of a permanent Chief Justice “from outside the state” to replace him.

Justice Sanjay Kumar Agrawal’s appointment — transferred in from the Chhattisgarh High Court, where he had himself been serving as Acting Chief Justice — followed that exact template. Whether or not the Collegium’s decision was directly responsive to Justice Mehta’s letters, the sequence illustrates precisely why the “outsider Chief Justice” convention discussed below is treated as more than a formality: when serious allegations are levelled against a court’s own administrative head, only a transfer from outside the court can be seen as an unambiguous circuit-breaker.

Why the Outsider-Chief-Justice Convention Matters

None of the eight judges elevated to lead a High Court was already a permanent judge of that same court (Justice Mishra, confirmed in Punjab & Haryana where he was Acting Chief Justice, is the partial exception, since he was already sitting there). This is not an accident. Since the Second Judges Case, In re: Presidential Reference (1998) 7 SCC 739, and the Memorandum of Procedure that followed, the settled practice has been that a Chief Justice should ordinarily come from outside the High Court they are appointed to head. The rationale is straightforward: a Chief Justice who has spent years as a puisne judge on the same court has existing relationships, past rulings, and institutional loyalties that a fully independent administrative head — the person responsible for roster allocation, case listing, and overseeing the court’s own judges — is better off without. Justice Kogje’s move from Gujarat to Madhya Pradesh, or Justice Bhati’s from Rajasthan to Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh, both fit that pattern precisely.

The Practical Cost of Prolonged Acting Arrangements

An Acting Chief Justice is not a caretaker in name only — the office carries full administrative power. But prolonged Acting arrangements create real friction for litigants and the Bar: constitution of larger benches, transfers of cases between judges, and administrative decisions requiring an institutional imprimatur can all be exercised more cautiously by a Chief Justice who may be replaced within weeks. Lawyers practising before the seven affected High Courts had, through mid-2026, been navigating exactly that uncertainty.

The September 5 notification also arrives against the backdrop of five more Chief Justice retirements expected before the end of 2026. Justice Sharma himself, no longer Acting Chief Justice after Justice Agrawal’s appointment but still a sitting judge of the Rajasthan High Court, is due to retire on September 26 on reaching the mandatory retirement age of 62; Chief Justices in Jharkhand, Orissa, and Uttarakhand are scheduled to retire later in the year. The Collegium’s work on High Court leadership, in other words, is not finished; it has simply cleared the immediate backlog created by the Supreme Court’s own expansion.

For practising lawyers, permanent Chief Justices bring a measure of predictability back to case management in eight High Courts — roster decisions, listing priorities, and the constitution of special or larger benches can now be made by judges expected to remain in the post rather than by officers holding the position on a week-to-week basis. For litigants with matters pending before Division Benches or requiring administrative orders from the Chief Justice’s office — bail applications needing urgent listing, PILs awaiting a bench constitution, or transfer petitions — the return to full-time leadership should translate into more consistent turnaround.

More broadly, this episode shows that the health of the High Court system depends on two linked appointment pipelines: judges to the Supreme Court, and Chief Justices to the High Courts left behind by those elevations. Expanding the Supreme Court’s strength, as Parliament did in mid-2026, is not merely an apex-court reform — it has a direct, sequential effect on High Court leadership that the Collegium and the government had to manage in real time. Whether that sequencing can be planned for in advance, rather than after a vacancy opens, is likely to remain a live administrative question the next time the Supreme Court’s sanctioned strength is revisited.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between an Acting Chief Justice and a permanent Chief Justice of a High Court?

An Acting Chief Justice is appointed by the President under Article 223 of the Constitution when the office of Chief Justice is vacant or the incumbent cannot perform their duties, and exercises full administrative powers including roster allocation in the meantime. A permanent Chief Justice is appointed through the ordinary Article 217 process on the Collegium’s recommendation and holds the post until retirement, transfer, or elevation, giving the position long-term institutional stability that an Acting arrangement is not designed to provide.

Why were seven High Courts without a permanent Chief Justice in mid-2026?

The gap resulted from two overlapping causes: the Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Act, 2026 expanded the apex court’s strength and triggered the elevation of several sitting High Court Chief Justices to the Supreme Court, and a separate cluster of Chief Justices reached the mandatory retirement age of 62 around the same time, faster than replacement recommendations could be cleared.

Why does the Collegium usually appoint an “outsider” as Chief Justice of a High Court?

The convention, rooted in the Second Judges Case and the Memorandum of Procedure, aims to preserve the administrative independence of the Chief Justice’s office. A judge elevated to head a court where they were not previously sitting has no pre-existing seniority relationships or case history with that court’s judges, which is considered important given the Chief Justice’s power to allocate cases and constitute benches.

What happens to pending matters when a High Court has only an Acting Chief Justice?

Administrative functions continue — an Acting Chief Justice can allocate cases, constitute benches, and issue administrative orders — but the arrangement is inherently provisional. In practice, Chief Justices and legal commentators have noted that Acting Chief Justices tend to be more cautious about major administrative restructuring, such as constituting new specialised benches or making long-term roster changes, given the possibility that a permanent appointee could take a different approach shortly after.

What was the controversy behind the Rajasthan High Court appointment?

Between August 2 and August 17, 2026, Supreme Court judge Justice Sandeep Mehta wrote three letters to the Chief Justice of India alleging corruption, nepotism, favouritism, and misuse of administrative powers by the then Acting Chief Justice of Rajasthan, Justice Sanjeev Prakash Sharma, and urged that a permanent Chief Justice be brought in from outside the state. Justice Sanjay Kumar Agrawal, transferred from the Chhattisgarh High Court, was appointed shortly after and took oath on September 7, 2026.

Are more Chief Justice changes expected before the end of 2026?

Yes. At least five sitting High Court Chief Justices are scheduled to retire before the end of 2026, including the Chief Justice of Rajasthan in late September, meaning the Collegium’s work on High Court leadership succession continues even after this round of eight appointments.

Sources