The Jharkhand High Court on Thursday barred non-tax payers from filing a public interest litigation (PIL). “A division bench of Acting Chief Justice Sushil Harkauli and DN Patel set the parameters for filing a PIL. The parameters include a term that only tax payers having a PAN (permanent account number) can file PIL,” Rajiv Kumar, a high court lawyer, said.
Kumar is pursuing more than a dozen PILs, including one demanding a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe in a scam involving former chief minister Madhu Koda.
The other parameters said that a person who is filing a PIL will have to give a detailed address.
If a social worker is filing a PIL then he will have to give details of his social work. The person who is filing a PIL will also have to give details of his credentials.
Filing PIL is very expensive matter so we will respect the lawyer who will offer to render free services to our eligbile NGO VOICE.
The narration of the cited court decision in the write-up, particularly its title – only taxpayers having PAN can file PIL- is rather too brief and cryptic to enable anyone to rightly understand or appreciate the true implications or ramifications of what the court has held.
However, pending a detailed study of the referred judgment, one may have the following comments to offer:
Going by the largely obtaining common perception, it is a settled proposition that any member of the public has a right to bring before the court a “public interest “ case, provided he has a “sufficient interest” in the proceedings, and is not a wayfarer, interloper, officious intervener or busy body.
As eminently pronounced by Krishna Iyer. J, speaking for the apex court in Fertilizer Corporation Kamgar Union’s case (A.I.R. 1981 S.C. 344):
“If a citizen is no more than a wayfarer or officious intervener without any interest or concern beyond what belongs to anyone of the 660 million people of this country, the door of the Court will not be ajar for him. But if he belongs to an organization which has special interest in the subject matter, if he has some concern deeper than that of a busy body, he cannot be told off at the gates, although whether the issue raised by him is justiciable may still remain to be considered.”
Undoubtedly, in today’s scenario, for applying/following the underlying proposition in the apex court’s quoted observations would require to be substituted, in place of the population figure of 660 million, a figure of around 1.2 billion or so.
With the increasingly globalized economy, in respect of any dispute pivoted on ‘corruption’ – admittedly a deep-rooted social evil having the ingerent potentials to cut across international borders, one may rightly urge that the crying need of the hour is that our constitutional experts and jurists must address themselves to two important posers:
§ Is it not eminently desirable to keep in view the cross border implications it entails, so as to proceed with circumspection?
§ Should not, therefore, the concept of “public interest” be reconsidered to mean and take within its ambit, also the interests of the public of the other countries around the world, with whom our nation has solemnly binding ties – such as, tax treaties,- not only the Indian public?
In the interests of our nation’s legal / judicial system, is not one justified in expecting them to do so, and come to the most appropriate conclusions?
vswaminathan