The Centre has appointed senior advocates Sandeep Sethi, Vikramjit Banerjee and Aman Lekhi as additional solicitor general for the Supreme Court.
The Centre also extended the tenure of four existing additional solicitor generals — Tushar Mehta, Pinky Anand, P S Narasimha and Maninder Singh till June 30, 2020.
The new appointments fill the vacancies in the team of the government’s law officers after the appointment of L Nageswara Rao as a Supreme Court judge in May 2016, and the resignation of Neeraj Kishan Kaul and Paramjit Singh Patwalia in June last year.
With the new appointments and extensions the team of ASGs has gone up to seven. The new ASGs will also have tenure till June 30, 2020
However, the government is yet to fill in the post of the Solicitor General of India which fell vacant after the resignation of Ranjit Kumar in October last year.
Besides, the government also appointed senior advocate Maninder Acharya as the ASG for the Delhi High Court after the post fell vacant on the resignation of Sanjay Jain.
Lekhi, the son of noted jurist P N Lekhi, is considered as a successful practitioner of criminal law, while Sethi, his batchmate at the Delhi University, specialises in intellectual property rights.
Banerjee, an alumini of the Bengaluru-based National Law School of India University, became the first from the institution to be appointed as the ASG. He graduated from NLSIU in 1997 and was appointed as the Advocate General of Nagaland in 2015. (DH)
