Fifteen Years Without Odisha’s Voice: How The Supreme Court’s Regional Imbalance Weakens Its Grasp Of India’s Ethos

The last judge whose parent High Court was Orissa to be elevated to the Supreme Court was Justice Dipak Misra, on 10 October 2011. He went on to become Chief Justice of India and retired in 2018. Nearly fifteen years have since passed, the Court’s sanctioned strength has grown to thirty-four, and scores of elevations have taken place from other High Courts — yet Odisha has not sent up a single judge drawn from its own judicial cadre.

The distinction between a judge’s parent High Court and the High Court he happens to head as Chief Justice is not pedantry; it is the heart of the matter. Since 2011 the Court has drawn judges from the Orissa High Court — Justices V. Gopala Gowda, Adarsh Kumar Goel, Amitava Roy and Vineet Saran — but each reached Cuttack as Chief Justice from a home court elsewhere and carried that formation to the apex Bench. What Odisha has not contributed for nearly fifteen years is a judge of its own, one whose judicial imagination was formed adjudicating Odisha’s own dockets. That is a structural silence, with consequences for how the apex court understands the distinctive ethos of the State.

The Nature of the Imbalance

The larger High Courts — Allahabad, Bombay, Delhi, Madras, Punjab & Haryana — have long dominated the Supreme Court. That is partly structural: they carry larger sanctioned strengths and heavier caseloads, so their pipelines run deeper. The current picture makes the skew concrete: eight High Courts have no sitting representative on the Court at all — Orissa, Jharkhand, Jammu & Kashmir, Ladakh, Uttarakhand, Meghalaya, Sikkim and Tripura — a belt that is overwhelmingly eastern, north-eastern and hill-State, while a handful of northern and western High Courts supply three or more judges each and together account for well over a third of the Bench.

Odisha’s judicial history is not one of scarcity. Eight of its own home-grown judges have sat on the Supreme Court, and three rose to be Chief Justice of India — Ranganath Misra, G.B. Pattanaik and Dipak Misra. The talent and the tradition plainly exist. The prolonged absence is therefore a failure of consistent prioritisation, not a want of quality.

Why the Gap Persists: The Myth of the Chief Justice, and the Tyranny of Seniority

One objection is heard whenever Odisha’s absence is raised: that no Odia judge presently heads a High Court as Chief Justice, and so none is “ready.” The premise is simply no longer true. Elevation to the Supreme Court has never required prior service as a Chief Justice of a High Court. Justice Sanjiv Khanna — who went on to become Chief Justice of India — was elevated in January 2019 directly as a puisne judge of the Delhi High Court, standing 33rd in the combined all-India seniority list, ahead of thirty-two judges senior to him. Justices B.V. Nagarathna and J.B. Pardiwala were likewise elevated as sitting puisne judges; even Justice Bagchi was recommended as a puisne judge, not a Chief Justice. The Collegium’s own statements deliberate over “Chief Justices and senior puisne Judges” alike. A senior sitting judge of the Orissa High Court is therefore fully eligible, here and now — the absence of an Odia Chief Justice elsewhere is no answer at all.

If eligibility is not the barrier, what is? The answer lies in two numbers that quietly decide judicial destinies long before the Supreme Court comes into view: the age at which a judge first joins the High Court, and the date that fixes his place in the combined all-India seniority of High Court judges. That single national list — ordered by date of first appointment across every High Court — governs both who is considered for elevation and who, once elevated, gathers enough residual tenure to reach the office of Chief Justice of India. A judge appointed younger enters the list earlier and higher, reaches the Supreme Court sooner, and serves longer. A judge appointed late enters low; by the time his turn might come, he lacks the years that make elevation worthwhile, still less the years needed to head the institution.

This is precisely where Odisha is disadvantaged, silently and structurally. Vacancies in the Orissa High Court are chronically under-filled and slow to be filled: against a sanctioned strength of thirty-three judges, the Court is today functioning with just seventeen — the Chief Justice included — leaving almost half the Bench vacant. And the shortfall is about to widen: in November 2026 Justice Chittaranjan Dash (11 November) and the Chief Justice, Justice Harish Tandon (15 November), demit office within days of each other, taking the working strength down to fifteen unless fresh warrants issue in time. Late and deferred appointments produce older appointees; older appointees rank lower in all-India seniority; lower seniority means fewer of Odisha’s judges ever reach the elevation zone with tenure to spare. The disadvantage compounds one delayed warrant at a time — and it begins not in Delhi, but in the timing of appointments at the Orissa High Court.

The cost is written into five decades of the highest office. In the last fifty years, only three judges of Odisha origin have become Chief Justice of India — Ranganath Misra, G.B. Pattanaik and Dipak Misra — and Justice Pattanaik held the office for barely forty days, his seniority all but exhausted the moment he reached the top. That is not a want of merit; it is the arithmetic of arriving too late in the queue. Appoint Odisha’s judges younger, fill the High Court’s vacancies on time, and the pipeline to the apex court reopens of its own accord.

How the Silence Shows Up

The absence of judges steeped in Odisha’s landscape does not produce dramatic “wrong” decisions. It produces something subtler — a thinner appreciation of the State’s ethos at the very points where it collides with national developmental and environmental claims. Odisha is home to a large tribal population living under the Fifth Schedule, whose customary relationships to land, forest and sacred geography are woven into their way of life. That living religious landscape — the Jagannath tradition and the hill deities revered by the Dongria Kondh and other Adivasi communities — sits atop districts of intensive mineral extraction such as Keonjhar, Sundargarh, Rayagada and Kalahandi, where mining, displacement and cultural survival exist in constant tension.

Consider the landmark Niyamgiri litigation. In Orissa Mining Corporation Ltd. v. Ministry of Environment & Forests (2013), the Supreme Court held that the gram sabhas of the Dongria Kondh must decide whether bauxite mining would affect their religious and cultural rights over the Niyamgiri Hills, revered as the abode of Niyam Raja. It is rightly celebrated as a high-water mark of indigenous-rights jurisprudence. Yet that Bench included no judge whose primary judicial formation had been in the Orissa High Court. The decision was principled and progressive — but a judge who had spent years adjudicating land, forest and tribal disputes in Odisha’s own courts might have brought a finer sense of how gram sabha consent actually operates, and of how sacred geography is lived. Contextual familiarity does not decide the outcome; it deepens the Court’s ability to anticipate consequences and to speak with authority to the communities affected.

The same holds across the long illegal-mining cases from Odisha’s iron and manganese belts, where the history of tenancy, forest rights and Adivasi dispossession is more readily grasped by judges who have carried those dockets for years. Without that institutional memory on the apex Bench, the Court must reconstruct local realities through affidavits and counsel — an imperfect substitute for judicial familiarity.

A Remedy the Collegium Has Just Used

This is not a demand for special treatment; it is a demand for consistency, because the Collegium has recently done precisely what Odisha seeks. In its statement of 6 March 2025 recommending Justice Joymalya Bagchi of the Calcutta High Court, the Collegium recorded that it had acted after “accommodating a plurality of considerations,” and had “taken into consideration the fact that, at present, the Bench of the Supreme Court is represented by only one Judge from the High Court at Calcutta.” It noted, further, that after Justice Altamas Kabir retired in 2013 “there has not been any Chief Justice of India from the High Court at Calcutta,” and that Justice Bagchi “would be in line to assume office as the Chief Justice of India” in 2031. Earlier, in recommending Justice B.V. Nagarathna, the Collegium had similarly weighed her path to becoming India’s first woman Chief Justice of India. The Collegium, in short, openly counts representation among its considerations and will even shape the line of succession to correct an imbalance. The mechanism plainly exists, and it has just been deployed for a comparable eastern High Court whose own gap in the office of Chief Justice ran from 2013. Odisha’s silence is both longer and more complete — no home-grown judge since 2011 — yet it has drawn no equivalent response.

Why This Matters Beyond One State

The Supreme Court is the final interpreter of a Constitution that guarantees both formal equality and the substantive recognition of diversity. When a State that contributes so heavily to India’s mineral wealth, tribal population and coastal vulnerability goes unrepresented for a decade and a half, the Court’s claim to speak for “We, the People” is quietly diluted — and it is felt most keenly by communities whose sacred hills and livelihoods are litigated in a forum that has not heard their regional judicial voice for years.

None of this is a plea for sentiment, and it is certainly not a plea for quota. When the framers debated what became Article 124, they chose merit and consultation over rigid formulae — but never intended that choice to harden into the permanent exclusion of entire regions. The Law Commission of India has since urged, in its 229th Report, that the apex court’s reach be made genuinely federal. Parliament’s own Standing Committee on Law and Justice has formally lamented the “diversity deficit” in the higher judiciary. Odisha’s fifteen-year silence is the sharpest illustration of precisely the imbalance the framers cautioned against, the Law Commission sought to cure, and Parliament has itself deplored.

Odisha has given the Republic distinguished judges and three Chief Justices of India. It seeks no favour and no concession — only fidelity to a principle that the Constitution’s architects, the Law Commission, Parliament, and the Collegium’s own recent practice have each affirmed: that the Supreme Court must carry within it the lived memory of every India it is sworn to protect. Restoring Odisha’s voice would enrich far more than the arithmetic of representation; it would deepen the very understanding on which the Court’s justice depends. The moment has come to complete that circle, and to let Odisha once again speak, through its own judges, in the highest forum of the Republic.

The author is a Senior Advocate and former President of the All Odisha Lawyers’ Association.