Eleven benches, one of them at Kochi: the tribunal for service matters of the forces

Background

Service disputes of serving and retired armed forces personnel go to a tribunal of their own, which works under the Ministry of Defence. There are 11 Benches of it in the country: the Principal Bench in New Delhi and ten regional benches, at Kochi, Chandigarh, Chennai, Guwahati, Jabalpur, Jaipur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai and Srinagar, with the Srinagar bench functioning at Jammu. Of those benches, the one in Kerala is at Kochi. Cases have come to it since its inception in 2009; as on 30.11.2018 a total of 11,705 of them were pending. For all eleven benches together the Government has sanctioned 34 judicial and administrative members, and the Tribunal is headed by a Chairperson. Its membership is of two kinds, judicial and administrative, and the administrative members have included retired senior service officers. Hearings of regional bench matters by video conferencing were later taken up at the Principal Bench, which spared applicants in far flung locations a journey.