The Finance Ministry has designated one Debts Recovery Tribunal (DRT) each in Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai for speedy adjudication and recovery in high-value cases of ₹100 crore and above.

This comes in the wake of banks making a request to the Ministry for setting up special DRTs for expediting recovery in high-value cases, in view of high pendency of cases in existing tribunals.  As of February-end, there were 1,61,034 pending cases at the DRTs, with DRT 2 Chandigarh having the most (10,578 cases), followed by DRT 3 Chandigarh (8,885) and DRT 3 Kolkata (7,171), according to the reply of Bhagwat Karad, Minister of State for Finance, to a question in Lok Sabha.

According to a notification issued by the Finance Ministry, DRT 1 Chennai will deal with all applications involving a debt amount of ₹100 crore and above falling under the jurisdiction of DRT 2 and 3 in Chennai, DRT Madurai, DRT 1 and 2 Bengaluru, DRT 1 and 2 Ernakulam, and DRT Coimbatore.

DRT 2 Delhi will deal with all applications involving a debt amount of ₹100 crore and above falling under the jurisdiction of DRT 1 and 2 Delhi, DRT Jaipur and DRT 1, 2 and 3 Chandigarh.

DRT 1 Mumbai will handle all applications involving a debt amount of ₹100 crore and above falling under the jurisdiction of DRT 2 and 3 Mumbai, DRT Pune and DRT 1, 2 and 3 Ahmedabad, DRT Aurangabad and DRT Nagpur.

“With DRT recovery hovering around 4 per cent in the last two years and yielding lesser (in percentage terms) than even in Lok Adalat (RBI Trend and Progress of Banking reports), creation of high-value (₹100 crore and above) benches for faster disposal and value maximization was urgent need of the hour.

“High-value cases are estimated to be numbering only 1 per cent, but amount wise constitute 80 per cent of claims,” said Hari Hara Mishra, Director, UV ARC. Organisation of three high-value DRT benches will help improve effectiveness in recovery mechanism, specifically high-value cases, he added.

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