The Central government on Monday cleared the appointment of four serving High Court Chief Justices and Senior Advocate V Mohana as judges of the Supreme Court, taking the Supreme Court’s effective strength to 37 judges against a sanctioned strength of 38.
Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Law and Justice Arjun Ram Meghwal announced the appointments on his official X (formerly Twitter) handle.
The appointments come days after the Union government increased the sanctioned strength of the Supreme Court from 34 to 38 judges, including the Chief Justice of India. The Court is presently functioning below its sanctioned strength and is expected to witness further vacancies with the retirement of Justice J K Maheshwari and Justice Pankaj Mithal later this month.
The appointments were recommended last week by the Supreme Court Collegium. The Collegium, headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and comprising Justice BV Nagarathna, Justice JK Maheshwari, Justice Vikram Nath and Justice MM Sundresh, took the decision during meetings held on May 22 and May 27, 2026.
The newly appointed judges are Justice Sheel Nagu, Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court; Justice Shree Chandrashekhar, Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court; Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva, Chief Justice of the Madhya Pradesh High Court; Justice Arun Palli, Chief Justice of the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh; and Senior Advocate V Mohana, who has been elevated directly from the Bar.
Justice Sheel Nagu, whose parent High Court is the Madhya Pradesh High Court, was born on January 1, 1965. He enrolled as an advocate in October 1987 and primarily practised in civil, constitutional and service law matters. He was appointed as an additional judge of the Madhya Pradesh High Court in May 2011 and became a permanent judge in May 2013. He subsequently served as Acting Chief Justice of the Madhya Pradesh High Court before being appointed Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court in July 2024.
During his judicial tenure, Justice Nagu delivered several significant decisions concerning environmental protection, privacy rights and personal liberty. He was also a member of the in-house inquiry committee constituted to examine allegations against Yashwant Varma in the cash-at-residence controversy, a matter that attracted considerable attention in judicial accountability discourse. He is due to retire on December 31, 2029.
Justice Shree Chandrashekhar, whose parent High Court is the Jharkhand High Court, has been serving as Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court. Born in Ranchi on May 25, 1965, he obtained his law degree from Campus Law Centre, Delhi University, and enrolled with the Bar Council in 1993. After nearly two decades of legal practice, he was appointed as an additional judge of the Jharkhand High Court in January 2013 and became a permanent judge in June 2014.
He later served as Acting Chief Justice of the Jharkhand High Court and was subsequently transferred to the Rajasthan High Court before being elevated as Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court in September 2025. Justice Chandrashekhar also served on the Parliamentary Judges Inquiry Committee constituted to examine allegations against Justice Yashwant Varma.
During his tenure on the Bench, he dealt with several high-profile matters, including proceedings arising from the Sohrabuddin Shaikh fake encounter case, the Malegaon blast case and litigation concerning the Versova–Bhayandar Coastal Road Project. His elevation is significant because Jharkhand currently has no representation in the Supreme Court. He will retire on May 24, 2030.
Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva, whose parent High Court is the Delhi High Court, has been serving as Chief Justice of the Madhya Pradesh High Court. Born on December 26, 1964, he graduated from Shri Ram College of Commerce and later obtained his law degree from Campus Law Centre, Delhi University. He qualified as an Advocate-on-Record before the Supreme Court in 1995 and was designated as a Senior Advocate by the Delhi High Court in 2011.
He was appointed as an additional judge of the Delhi High Court in April 2013 and became a permanent judge in March 2015. After being transferred to the Madhya Pradesh High Court in 2024, he took oath as its Chief Justice in July 2025. Before his elevation to the Bench, he served as Standing Counsel for the Bar Council of India for more than two decades. He also chaired a sub-committee of the National Court Management Systems relating to human resource development within the judiciary. He is expected to have a tenure of approximately three-and-a-half years in the Supreme Court.
Justice Arun Palli, whose parent High Court is the Punjab and Haryana High Court, has been serving as Chief Justice of the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Born in Patiala on September 18, 1964, he obtained his law degree from Panjab University in 1988 and practised extensively before the Punjab and Haryana High Court. He served as Additional Advocate General for Punjab between 2004 and 2007 and was designated as a Senior Advocate in 2007.
He was elevated as a judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court in December 2013 and later took oath as Chief Justice of the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh in April 2025. Justice Palli also served as Executive Chairman of the Haryana State Legal Services Authority and supervised several mediation initiatives and Lok Adalat programmes aimed at reducing judicial backlog and promoting alternative dispute resolution. He is expected to serve in the Supreme Court until September 2030, giving him a tenure of a little over three years.
Senior Advocate V Mohana’s elevation is particularly significant as direct appointments from the Bar to the Supreme Court remain rare. Her appointment restores representation from the Bar in the Apex Court, an important element of professional diversity within the higher judiciary.
Senior Advocate V Mohana becomes only the second woman in India’s history to be directly elevated from the Bar to the Supreme Court after Indu Malhotra in 2018. With her elevation, she will join Justice B V Nagarathna as one of only two serving women judges in the Apex Court.
Born on June 27, 1966, in Coimbatore, Mohana graduated from Coimbatore Law College in 1988. She trained under Senior Advocate C S Vaidyanathan, became an Advocate-on-Record in the Supreme Court in 1996 and was designated as a Senior Advocate by the Supreme Court in 2015. She was a classmate of sitting Supreme Court judge K. V. Viswanathan and also worked alongside him in the office of former Attorney General for India K. K. Venugopal.
Over the course of her career, she has appeared in several constitutionally significant and high-profile matters before the Supreme Court, including cases concerning permanent commission for women officers in the armed forces, property rights of senior citizens and challenges relating to the Karnataka hijab ban. Her appointment will also make her the 12th woman judge in the history of the Supreme Court. Since she has been elevated directly from the Bar, she is expected to have a comparatively longer tenure of nearly five years and will retire in June 2031.
Under the collegium system, recommendations made by the Supreme Court Collegium are forwarded to the Union Government for processing, following which warrants of appointment are issued by the President of India after completion of the consultative process and requisite clearances.
With these appointments, 37 of the 38 sanctioned positions in the Supreme Court stand filled, leaving only one vacancy. The elevations bring the Court close to its full sanctioned strength, broaden representation from different High Courts, restore representation from the Bar and further enhance gender diversity on the Bench.
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