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Informist, Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2026

 

NEW DELHI – Emphasising that it will not allow anyone to defame the judiciary, the Supreme Court Wednesday said it has passed an order to take suo moto cognisance of a section on corruption in the judiciary in the National Council of Educational Research and Training's new social science textbook for Class 8.

 

"I am informing you that I have already passed an order and am taking the matter suo motu. I will not allow anyone on earth to taint the integrity of the institution and defame the institution. At any cost, I will not permit it. Whosoever high it may be, the law will take its course. I know how to deal with it," said a bench led by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant.

 

Chief Justice Kant said the section seemed to be a deliberate and calculated measure to defame the judiciary. "This is definitely concerning the entire institution. The bar and the bench are perturbed. Every stakeholder in the system is really perturbed, I am receiving a lot of calls and messages. There are judges of high courts who are perturbed," said Chief Justice Kant.

 

The top court's observation came after advocates Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Kapil Sibal stated that they were "deeply disturbed" by Class 8 students being taught that the judiciary was corrupt. The selectivity of the issue was amazing, as if there was no corruption elsewhere, said Singhvi. There is not a word about corruption in bureaucracy, politics, public life, he added.

 

NCERT's social sciences book for Class 8 has a section that talks about the challenges faced by the judicial system including "corruption at various levels of the judiciary" and massive backlog on account of multiple reasons, such as lack of adequate number of judges, complicated legal procedures, and poor infrastructure.

 

The section states that judges are bound by a code of conduct that governs not only their behaviour in court, but also how they conduct themselves outside it. The section refers to the judiciary's internal mechanism to maintain accountability, and an "established procedure for receiving complaints through the Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System (CPGRAMS)", adding that over 1,600 such complaints were received between 2017 and 2021.  End

 

Reported by Surya Tripathi

Edited by Ashish Shirke

 

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