COIMBATORE: Some government departments here are at loggerheads with the judiciary and the Law Department. While the judiciary and Law Ministry have constituted Lok Adalats to settle long pending cases so that the backlog of pending litigations can be cleared, officials of some government departments are refusing to honour decrees passed by the Lok Adalat.Whereas, the law mandates that any decree passed by the Lok Adalat after a voluntary compromise formula between two warring parties is final. A case in point is a recent ordeal faced by 77-year-old Kannammal of Vellamadai village near here. The septuagenarian had won a property dispute at a Lok Adalat. However, when she submitted a copy of the decree to get the disputed property registered in her name, she was shocked that the revenue staff there refused to acknowledge the document as a “valid judicial order.” It emerged that the staff were ignorant about the existence of Lok Adalats.“This is not an isolated case. Every month we receive at least a dozen such complaints. Usually the police and registration department staff are ignorant about Lok Adalats. Such ignorance defeats the purpose of conducting Lok Adalats,” rues G Mahizhenthi, Secretary, Coimbatore District Legal Services Authority.
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