A Bitter Pill
However, these successes need to be weighed against arrears in courts. There are an estimated 20-25 million cases pending in the country today, High Courts have 3 million pending cases and there are another 30,000 cases before the Supreme Court. Hence the fear that PIL will deluge courts, especially when PIL cases are often given priority by many courts at the expense of other cases.
While the fear of courts being deluged is true, any attempt to curb public interest litigation through legislative means is fraught with problems. There is the perception PIL is sought to be curbed because corruption charges have been brought against politicians and bureaucrats. This is not to deny that frivolous PIL cases do exist. In 1986, a petition challenging the validity of the Quoran was admitted by the Calcutta High Court. However, avenues for preventing such frivolous litigation exist within the court system itself. For instance, in Sachidanand Pandey and another (1987), the Supreme Court stated, But this does not mean that the doors of this court are always open for anyone to walk in. It is necessary to have some self-imposed restraint on public interest litigants. Subsequently, in Sudip Mazumdar v. State of Madhya Pradesh (1994), the Supreme Court set out ten commandments that should be followed for public interest litigation. However, the problem is that the courts have themselves not been
very consistent in following these principles. The answer does not therefore lie in a Public Interest Litigation (Regulation) Bill, but in an overhaul of the legal system and in courts being more selective. If perjury and filing of false first information reports (FIRs) is not punished, that is the bane of the entire legal system. Why incorporate such specific provisions to regulate public interest litigation alone? Stated differently, the system needs caps on verbal arguments and limits on the number of adjournments. Solutions also exist for tackling the general phenomenon of arrears. Any attempt specially targeted at PIL is likely to be misguided.